RH8 Topics Don't Display

[DebbieEisenstein]

We recently upgraded from RH7 to RH8.  I'm running 8.0.2.208. The files generate fine, and in the output on my desktop I can see everything as I should (TOC, Index, Glossary, and all the topics and links). However, when the output is put onto the library that it's written for, when you click the Help button, you don't see the topics. You can see everything else fine (TOC, Index, etc), but the pane that holds the topics is blank. Our software developer for the libraries thinks it may be Unicode because our web server is not unicode compliant for multi-byte characters. He asked if we can disable Unicode. Could that be the problem, and if so, can it be disabled?  We used RH7 for a long time and never had this problem.

The error our Web server is giving is:

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /home/embedded/library/HTTPService/htdocs.adic/RoboHelp/a_dpf.htm on line 1

The issue seems to be the first line of the new RH 8 files. They have the 3 bytes (ef bb bf) denoting a Unicode file and this xml tag.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

The OLD RH 7 files did not have this line.

Thanks for any help!!!

[Peter Grainge]

Your developer is probably right. The options are enable the server or email me via my site and I can send you an Adobe produced tool allowing different encoding.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[perttime]

Is your help in English only?

Or other language that manages with Latin 1 characters?

UTF-8 is pretty handy when you get even slightly more exotic characters.

Otherwise, I am sure Peter has it right.

[DebbieEisenstein]

Well, Peter's tool did exactly what it said it would. However, turning off unicode turned out not to be the source of the problem! 😞

The developer figured out that what caused the problem is the very first line of HTML source code on each topic which starts out with <?xml......>.  It has something to do with the PHP interpreter not being able to interpret it. I did a global search and replace in DreamWeaver to remove this line from all the files in the generated output and now it works great. So my only remaining question is... is there a setting in RoboHelp that would cause RoboHelp to not put that first line of code in so that I don't have to manually remove it after I generate each time? It's not a huge deal to do the manual search and replace but it's one more thing to remember.

Thanks again for all the help so far.

Debbie

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Hi Debbie

What if you click Tools > Options and enable the option labeled Convert RoboHelp edited topics to HTML? Does that help?

As luck would have it, I was just today experimenting with this option.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7 or 8 moments from now - $24.95! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcererStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[DebbieEisenstein]

Awesome - that did it! Thank you thank you!

This is my first time using the forums and I am so impressed.

Debbie