Creating HTML Help, Page will not be displayed

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waldemar.hersacher
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Creating HTML Help, Page will not be displayed

Unread post by waldemar.hersacher »

I copied an existing project to a new folder. The project is building fine in the old folder.
I excluded some topics from the build and created HTML help new.
Opening the HTML Help the page could not be displayed by the HMTL Help viewer. The problem is not related with any access rights to the file or MS security settings.

After investigating this I found out that the path name of the project is causing the problem.

The old path name has the part \Treiber in C\ and the new one \Treiber in C#\. It is the character '#' which prevents the access to the pages.

BTW:
Web help is working fine with the '#' character in the path. HM is not able to display it directly after publishing but opening it with a double click in Windows Explorer will display it correctly.
Waldemar
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Tim Green
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Re: Creating HTML Help, Page will not be displayed

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Waldemar,

This is an ancient bug in Microsoft's CHM system. It has been there since Windows 98 and has never been fixed and probably never will be. The whole CHM system is highly allergic to special characters anywhere in paths, long paths, and special characters and also spaces in CHM file names. The "#" character anywhere in the output path will immediately crash the CHM compiler, for example, and will also cause the CHM viewer to fail, as you have discovered.

The only thing to do is avoid things like this in connection with CHMs. 8)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
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