Non-breaking hyphen: errant behavior

Please post bug reports for earlier versions of Help & Manual (3 and 4) here, along with reports for TNT.

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Winsteps
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Non-breaking hyphen: errant behavior

Unread post by Winsteps »

Put HTML code: & #8209; ‑ a non-breaking hyphen into a webpage.
Display the webpage. The hyphen displays.
Copy and paste into HM4 topic. A box displays. (Except in Lucida Sans Unicode).
Publish the HM4 topic to HTMLHelp & Browser-based Help. The hyphen displays.
Publish to Adobe PDF. A box displays. (Except in Lucida Sans Unicode).

Publish to Word RTF. A box displays. (Except in Lucida Sans Unicode).
The RTF file has \U8209 where it should have \_ to be compatible with Word.
In Word, this can be remedied by a global replace of the box character by ^~
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

If you are copying and pasting from the web page back to H&M this may not work. HTML codes will not work in PDF, RTF and Winhelp -- these are non-HTML formats and all inline HTML is ignored there.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Winsteps
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Unread post by Winsteps »

Thank you, Tim, but it is a unicode display problem, not an HTML problem.

Please copy and paste the following line into a topic to see the problem in action:
En Dash &#8211 – displays correctly. Hyphen &#8209 ‑ does not.
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Hmm... I really don't understand your problem and nobody on the development team does either, perhaps it's a misunderstanding. Quote from our lead developer: "I don't see the problem. When you copy and paste from a web page you are never copying HTML, you are copying RTF that the browser (e.g. MSIE) is copying to the clipboard. Copy and paste in the editor can only handle ANSI text, Unicode text and RTF. We can import HTML when we read HTML pages but not from the clipboard."
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Winsteps
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Unread post by Winsteps »

Thanks, Tim. My apologies for such a poor explanation of a "font substitution" problem when using a Browser to display an HM4 topic. So this converts this request into another plea for:
Please provide on the HM4 menu bar: Topic > Display Topic as Webpage
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Winsteps wrote:Please provide on the HM4 menu bar: Topic > Display Topic as Webpage
That would be nice but it's less trivial than it sounds because it would really mean doing a full compile, including merging the topic with the appropriate HTML template etc. You can actually already achieve this quickly enough by compiling to Browser Help with the "Selected Topics" option in the Compile dialog. This will compile only the topics that are currently selected in the TOC.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Winsteps
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Unread post by Winsteps »

Thanks, Tim. Very helpful.

Click on the topic. Ctrl+F9 then OK does it after the first time through.

Modifying "Compiler options" to suppress messages helps the flow.

This is great because I can now quickly see how "Autosized" Tables will look to the user. (Noticeably different from how they appear in the HM4 editor).

This suggests a new entry in the Topic right-click menu .....
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