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Just came across (and solved) a small but perplexing problem that hit me in
RoboHelp 5.X and Word97 SR-2 to create WinHelp 4 help files: a mysterious
font change, plus the help compiler error that "one or more topics have too
many braces". Since this may affect one or two techwhirlers who are still
working with older versions of RH, I've posted it for your edification.
Here's the problem: Here and there, I'd highlighted a phrase enclosed in
quotation marks and turned it into a hypertext jump to a new topic. Looked
fine in Word, but when I compiled the help file, lo and behold, the font I'd
specified for the jump text started misbehaving: in some cases, Arial turned
into Times New Roman (the font used for body text in my Normal.dot
template); in other cases, the jump text changed fonts, and all text from
that point to the end of the paragraph stayed in the correct font, but was
colored green (the default for hyperlinks), even though it wasn't working as
a hyperlink. The compiled file worked just fine, but surely looked odd.
The solution? Remove the quotation marks. I'm speculating that something
about how Word saves the quotation marks in the pre-compilation .RTF file
fools the WinHelp compiler, causing it to override the font definition.
(Possibly reverting back to normal.dot or some other template.)
Has anyone encountered similar behavior in later versions of RoboHelp? I'm
not planning to upgrade anytime soon (better the devil you know... <g>), but
I'm curious about whether it's worth reporting this to Blue Sky (or whatever
it is they're calling themselves now).
"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer
