Japanese icons

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Tim Frost
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Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Frost »

When viewed in IE 11 on Windows 10, our Help screen shows what appear to be Japanese glyphs instead of the default icons for contents, keyword and search. Firefox and Chrome and Edge are normal, as is IE when I load the help from a local folder with a file:/// prefix. Any idea what I should look for? Using the webhelp slate blue skin, with only minor modifications.
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Tim Green
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Re: Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Tim,

This means that web fonts are disabled in your IE settings. The "icons" in these skins are actually a special compressed font with just a few characters that save a lot of space for speed and scale without going fuzzy. See the instructions for correcting this here in the Premium Pack documentation:

http://www.it-authoring.com/info/pp3hel ... ns_ie.html

By the way: Check the title of the Premium Pack help chapter in the main Help+Manual help to make sure that it displays "3.30" as the version. If it doesn't, you need to update your copy using the download credentials you received when you purchased the Pack. If you no longer have those please contact support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) and we will help you out.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Tim Frost
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Re: Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Frost »

Thanks; fixed and documented in our help. We are using the latest versions of HM and PP.
Tim Frost
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Re: Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Frost »

This issue has come back to bite me in the 3.35 EWriter V3 skins, and appears to require font download to be enabled in the Internet Zone security settings in IE.

I just about don't mind telling users they are required to do this if they are accessing help on the Internet anyway. But we need to use EWriter format help for users even when they are in a secure environment, perhaps without access to the Internet. It looks odd to have to say that because of this font download requirement, the menu tabs will always show Katakana characters!

Is there a way that this feature can be turned off, specifically for EWriter skins? Or is it feasible to modify the skin to show a fixed image instead of the font? It only has to look good on Windows desktop, so I see no reason to use a special downloaded font in this case.

Otherwise the new EWriter skins look great, and we will be able to match the style of our on-line help when this issue is resolved!
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Re: Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Tim,

At the moment the font icons can't be replaced easily because -- well, because they are fonts and not icons at all and the skin depends on that. I'm afraid this didn't show up in testing. What seems a little strange is that EWriter is subject to the Internet Zone security settings rather than the Intranet Zone, which would seem more logical. I'm checking this with our developers.
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Re: Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Green »

Update: The reason it's in the Internet zone is because it is using a fully-qualified URL -- internally the EWriter links use URLs like this (the port number can change):

Code: Select all

http://127.0.0.1:8000/helpman.7 
Perversely, Windows places all intranet links using a fully-qualified URL or even an IP address in the Internet zone. The text describing this from Microsoft is:

  • "Be aware that when you access a local area network (LAN) or an intranet share, or an intranet Web site by using an Internet Protocol (IP) address or by using a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), the share or Web site is identified as being in the Internet zone instead of in the Local intranet zone."
So pretty much all intranet links are actually placed in the Internet zone, now that most intranets use proper web servers. This means that there is not really any distinction made between genuine intranet and Internet connections for security purposes. They are all treated as Internet zone.

However, there is a simple solution. You just need to add your localhost to the Local intranet zone:
  1. Open Internet Explorer's Internet Options dialog, select the Security tab and click on Local Intranet.
  2. Click on Sites and then Advanced and add http://127.0.0.1 and for good measure also http://localhost as local intranet sites.
Then the local zone will be applied to the local web server inside EWriter, solving the problem.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Re: Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Frost »

It is marginally less threatening than changing the properties of the Internet Zone, but not quite a "solution to the problem" yet! It's still a bit embarrassing that a help format which 'can be used without an internet connection' actually requires one. And it still seems a bit surprising, certainly to some of our users, to have to change any of their browser settings, though enabling scripting can be sold as making the documentation much easier to use.

However further research has found some W10 and W7 machines on which font download seems to be enabled out of the box - or I certainly do not recall having changed it. It might be that font download was disabled while I was testing the issue back in June, on the machines I looked at yesterday. Maybe I should create a brand new virgin VM and try again (unless someone has one available).

On one VM I tested today, on first loading the E-Writer I saw a brief flash of the Katakana on the tabs before the correct icons appeared. Even if changing to not use fonts is a step too far, might it be possible simply to leave the tabs completely blank until/unless a font has been found? Since they have hints to explain the icons anyway, it would look less like an obvious bug we had missed.

But once again, it will be great to be able to have the E-Writer help (now our context-sensitive help) matching the appearance of the on-line help.
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Re: Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Tim,
It's still a bit embarrassing that a help format which 'can be used without an internet connection' actually requires one.
Yes, I do get that. However, the opposite is the case, in fact: Windows is behaving as though it requires an Internet connection (which it doesn't) and the settings change corrects that. What is really happening is that Windows is configured to treat localhost as though it were in the Internet zone.

In the long term we may need another solution for this, possibly static icons, but that will be a major task. For the time being I'm going to wait and see if large numbers are affected or not.
However further research has found some W10 and W7 machines on which font download seems to be enabled out of the box
That will always be the case on the default Internet zone settings (Medium - High). Having to change anything would be the exception rather than the rule, since font download is really not a security issue.
On one VM I tested today, on first loading the E-Writer I saw a brief flash of the Katakana on the tabs before the correct icons appeared.
That might happen on a slow machine, but probably only on the first load. After that they should be cached. I haven't ever seen it myself.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Re: Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Tim,

Update: I've just finished replacing the font icons in all the V3 skins with SVG sprites using the same icons. As a result, you will no longer have any problems for users whose security settings block font downloads. The SVG sprites display sharper on some machine/browser combinations, take up much less space (all the icons are now just a single tiny text file) and also allow you to replace icons with your own. You just need to have a single-color SVG icon. Then you edit the .svg file in a text editor (SVGs are plain text source code) and copy just the path element from it. Then you paste it into the new svg icons file, overwriting the path element of the icon you want to replace.

If you'd like to test this let me know which skin you'd like to experiment with at support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) and I'll send you a packaged version.

In addition to the SVG sprites I've done quite a bit of fine tuning in the CSS and have added new variables that let you configure the description displayed over featured images when you use them. You can define its position over the image (top or bottom, currently only top is possible), the font to use and the font size in rems.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Tim Frost
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Re: Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Frost »

Thanks for this; I had seen it mentioned in another posting of yours. I will definitely make use of this when it arrives and I would like to test it but at the moment I just don't have the time!
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Re: Japanese icons

Unread post by Tim Green »

Tim Frost wrote:Thanks for this; I had seen it mentioned in another posting of yours. I will definitely make use of this when it arrives and I would like to test it but at the moment I just don't have the time!
No problem -- I'm in the same situation myself... 8)
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