Using RoboHelp 8

Bizarrely you may get this message if you import a PDF created in a recent version of Acrobat including the one that ships with RoboHelp 8.

To test this is the cause, import an old PDF or one created by another PDF writer.

The workaround is to set Acrobat to save with Acrobat 5 compatibility.

If you double click a broken link in Project Manager, you may encounter a crash when you next save. If you think you have encountered this problem, follow these steps to confirm it.

1. Delete a topic that has an index keyword.
2. Click No when prompted to allow RH to fix broken links.
3. An entry will appear under Broken Links.
4. Double click to fix the broken links and change the topic to which the index entry points.
5. The broken link will disappear and all will appear OK.
6. Click Save All and RH will crash.

The workaround is to double click the broken link so that you can see the keyword that needs fixing. Then to go to the Index editor and fix it there.

1] The 8.0.1 patch fixed a number of popup problems but not a CHM only problem whereby text popups in topics with dropdown hotspots were not positioned correctly. Run the PopupPlacementFixer script provide by Adobe to fix that. This script also fixed a problem reported by one user where the output code for a popup was being written into her source files causing them not to work. See this thread.

2] The same patch created a problem whereby custom size popup are not the specified size. The CustomPopupSizeFixer script adds to the defined sized by determined amounts that can be changed. See this thread.

3] Problems will also be encountered with popups if the CSS contains negative left margins. If viewed normally, the topic will display correctly but if viewed as a popup, the text with a style that has a negative margin and any following text will not display in preview and not in some versions of some browsers. The workaround for browser issues if you must have negative margins is to use the Convert to HTML option when generating.

4] In RoboHelp for Word, hotspot images are broken. See this thread that includes a workaround provided you need no more than 36 hotspots in any one project. Not good I know but the best I could come up with!

5] Add extra line is needed at the foot of popup topics to avoid the last line being cut off.

The symptoms of the folder bug are:

• On opening a project, the cursor flickers between an arrow and an hour glass (XP) or the beachball (Vista).
• The project may crash.
• On opening the project, there may be broken links and folders and files are missing from Project Manager.
• In isolated cases the missing files may also have been deleted from the hard disk.

It is important that all users apply this patch whether or not they have encountered this problem. After applying this patch, a project opened on an 8.0.2 computer cannot be opened on a computer without this patch. That is by design.

If you have encountered this bug and need assistance, see Opening RoboHelp Projects.

Click here to see the readme that is installed.

If your table alignment is defined in your CSS, it will be ignored in the Design Editor. It will be OK in preview and in WebHelp or FlashHelp. It will also be ignored in Printed Documentation and CHMs.

The only workaround at the moment is to apply inline vertical alignment via Table Properties.

This problem was fixed in Build 8.0.1

If your topics include a Mini TOC, it will not appear in printed documentation. I use them as a What's Covered in a similar way to this topic so I want them in the printed output. Some of the other new RoboHelp 8 features do not work properly with printed documentation so I am inclined to think this is a bug rather than something omitted by design. I can see that not everyone might want the Mini TOC in their printed output so perhaps it should be an option in the print wizard.

You can manually enter Index Keywords with an ampersand but and if your topic title is This & That and you use the Smart Index Wizard, it creates two keywords so This & That becomes

This
That

Derek's project was fine in earlier versions of RoboHelp. If he applied a conditional build tag to a dropdown hotspot and included that in his build expression, both the hotspot and the content were excluded in the online help and the printed documentation. In RoboHelp 8, he found the online help was OK but in the printed documentation the content still got printed. To be clear, the hotspot did not appear, the content did, which left it sort of mid-air.

The only workaround so far is to apply the tag to the content as well. This has been reported.

This problem was fixed in Build 8.0.1

I received a call from one of my team to advise that a number of topics were showing in the topic list without any title and if you opened them, they had lost their styles. Investigation showed it was worse as most of the HTML tags had disappeared so the only way back was hand coding in a text editor!

Fortunately he was aware it had been OK before running Tools > Spell Check Project and we soon established that by running that again in a good project, the problem could be reproduced.

Reporting the problem soon established a workaround. Make sure that at least one topic is open in the Design Editor before you run Spell Check Project. We tested that and found it does indeed then work without problem. Nonetheless, we will backup beforehand just to be safe.

This problem was fixed in Build 8.0.1

The Show / Hide works in IE and FireFox locally but not in FireFox on a server. If you find that, you need to edit the topic on the server. You will find a reference to ehlpdhtm.js, amend the relative path by changing the back-slashes to forward slashes.

This problem was fixed in Build 8.0.1

It's not a bug, it is a limitation of the Microsoft HTML Compiler. This new feature is for WebHelp, WebHelp Pro, FlashHelp and FlashHelp Pro.

A good place to start is the online help!

Also try this blog

Panic not. You just need to hold down the Shift key while you drag.

One of the uses of merged help is that you can remove a child project and the help just carries on working as if it had never been there, no need to regenerate. When you are creating a merge, it is likely you will select the Mark of the Web (MOW) check box so that you can see the help working locally.

This causes a problem in RoboHelp 8 if you delete a child project from the output. Not only will that child not display, the subsequent child projects will not display.

Regenerate the help without MOW and you will be able to delete child projects from the output as in earlier versions.

In Internet Explorer you may get the yellow bar requiring you to allow Active content to run. Your other option is to go into the settings and tick Allow active content to run in files on My Computer (Advanced Tab).

This is not a problem with Firefox.

Julian found RH8 was slow opening topics and then advised me as below.

"I did some investigation using Process Monitor and found that RH was trying to find a file called BaseCSS_res.dll, and when it didn't find it where it expected to (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 8\RoboHTML\en_us), it went looking for it on other drives and the network, and when it didn't find it, it just repeatedly looped back to the beginning, and after 10-20 seconds gave up.

I first found that if I disabled my network connection it would give up looking far quicker and RH would become far more responsive. Unfortunately, permanently disabling the network was not a real option, but I thought that if I replaced the missing file with a null/empty file it might fix the issue. So what I did was:

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 8\RoboHTML\en_us

2. Create a new empty text file

3. Name the file BaseCSS_res.dll. This seems to have fixed all our "slow" issues, RH is now very "snappy".

This solution has not been verified so I don't know if it has any other implications. Do check it out in a copy of your project.

I searched my Adobe folders and only found BaseCSS.DLL so you might want to try that instead.

This problem was fixed in Build 8.0.1

Colum responded to a post with this useful piece of information.

I've just contacted Adobe about this feature request and have been told that the SALIdxSvc12.xml file in your install folder can be edited to exclude the baggage file types that you DO NOT want indexed. If you backup this file and open it in Notepad, you'll find a line like <Type Ext=".pdf"/>. If you remove this line (or <Type Ext=".doc"/>, <Type Ext=".docx"/>, etc.) from the file, and save it, baggage files of this type are excluded from being the search. You'll need to relaunch RH to pick these changes.

The only proviso for this is that you should only remove file types not add them! Hope this helps as a workaround.

I would just add that I recommend you archive a copy of the original file somewhere, just in case you need to reverse things later.

If you add a multi level list and click Preview, you may find nothing displays, just a white screen.
Close and reopen RoboHelp to restore the display. You may encounter some generation issues too but these seem to be resolved by closing and reopening the project again.

This will only be seen by users who have installed Adobe's Creative Suite 4 after installing RoboHelp. The workaround is to uninstall and reinstall RoboHelp.

You apply an autonumbering style and press Enter, the numbering disappears. This only occurs if you do not type some text after the numbering and it is a small bug, just enter a space after the numbering.

If a project has any topic(s) with links to Word and/or PDF documents, then those documents are searchable in the output. If all links are excluded by a build expression, then they should not be searchable, but they are. You need to remove them from baggage while you generate.

Edwin Vanderlans reported: The first time the help shows fine, but when I leave the browser open and call the help again I receive an error : Access denied, whcsh_home.htm, line 196 char8.

Adobe posted a correction.

Backup the supplied c:\program files\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 8\RoboHTML\WebHelp5Ext\template_csh\whchs_home.htm and replace it with this file.

This problem was fixed in Build 8.0.1