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Subject:Re: Keeping it together From:David Knopf <david -at- KNOPF -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 16 Apr 1999 14:54:55 -0700
Sabra Aaron asks:
| Hello, all. Checked the archives and must unlurk for a simple question:
| any tips on keeping a word w/different formatting on different letters
| together? Using RH7 and Word to build winhelp2K. I have labels that also
| have hotkeys, so the hotkey letter is underlined: E_x_it (press ALT +
| X). It all looks fine in Word, but when I look at compiled help, I end
| up with E_x_
| it broken up between two lines. Or "
| Quoted" -- open quote left dangling.
|
| As my project director would say, "That's really a quality issue. Fix
| it." Bluesky's suggestion was to use paragraph formatting to keep lines
| together, but I get a big long line, not just the word kept together.
| Their alternate suggestion was to put all the text in a table.
| Is that all I can do? Or is there some other secret?
Unfortunately, you've run into a limitation in WinHelp. It's really got
nothing to do with RoboHELP in particular. WinHelp's display engine treats
formatting changes within a word as if they were line breaks; hence, the
problems with the underlined characters.
You can solve this problem using "keep lines together" only if you put hard
returns wherever you want a line break. However, your line breaks won't
necessarily look very good if your user resizes the help window!
You can solve the problem by putting your text in tables, but that may cause
other problems if you are also creating other formats (HTML, HTML Help,
WebHelp, or printed documentation). Would you want tables in all your
formats? Maybe ... maybe not.
In short, there's no perfect solution. In your case, I would opt to remove
the underlining from the shortcut key. If that is your company's standard,
though, you may not like that solution.
Quotation marks, btw, will wrap correctly provided you don't use smart
quotes.
