Wrong character display in asian CHM with Flare 9

Bea Lac · Post by **Bea Lac** » Wed Oct 16, 2013 2:09 am

Our projects are translated in several languages, including simplified chinese and japanese.
Last year with Flare 8, we have compiled and published the projects, after setting the Project language in chinese or japanese. The CHM files work fine and show correct asian characters, both in the TOC et on the pages.
Since Flare 9, only the TOC is well displayed.
Is there something to set in the target ? (or skin ?)
For information : I'm working with Windows7 Pro. I also tried with a Windows 7 enterprise including chinese language packs, and the result is the same.
Hope so can help.
Thanks
BÃ©atrice

Post by **Nita Beck** » Wed Oct 16, 2013 6:58 am

I'll go point a localization expert I know to this post. She can probably answer this question quickly...

alt_jennifer · Post by **alt_jennifer** » Wed Oct 16, 2013 8:13 am

Bonjour Beatrice and thanks Nita

Unfortunately I don't have easy, good news for you. While I've done plenty of Chinese CHMs, I haven't had to do one in Flare 9 yet. But I took one of our Flare 8 Chinese CHM projects, opened it in Flare 9, built the CHM, and ran into the same problem you are having! It's quite flummoxing. I did have my Project language set to Chinese, like you did. And the problem seems to occur whether the language is set in the Target or not. I think the problem must be a bug in Flare 9.

To generate a CHM, Flare has to take the UTF-8 topic content and transform it into native encoding, which is GB2312 for Simplified Chinese. In Flare 8, Flare handles this just fine. I suspect, though, that the Flare 9 transformation process is broken somehow. But that's just a guess -- either way, we should log this with MadCap Support!

Now I will say that usually when I see a breadcrumb at the top with corrupted text, it usually means that the stylesheet in Flare was not UTF-8. But I know that my stylesheet in this particular project is definitely UTF-8, and my breadcrumbs were still corrupted. So I do think it's a bug in the generation process.

Sorry I couldn't give you a solution!

Bea Lac · Post by **Bea Lac** » Wed Oct 16, 2013 8:27 am

Thanks a lot for taking time to make some test. I will report the problem to Madcap Support. Fortunately I still have Flare 8 for projects building!

techwriter31 · Post by **techwriter31** » Wed Oct 16, 2013 8:39 am

We had the exact same problem with Flare 9. The original problem we noticed was in the English CHM, trademarks and copyrights were garbled. But that problem was only occurring on one PC, and didn't occur on that PC when using Flare 8. We contacted support and they recommended we add the following to the English master page's header:

Code: Select all

    <head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Windows-1252" /></head>

But then when generating the CHM in other languages, we discovered the same problem you're having on multiple PCs using Flare 9. First we tried a master page without the meta tag and the problem still occurred, although the garbled characters were slightly different. Then , one of our other tech writers found the solution for this: create separate master pages for each Asian language and modify the meta tag within the header of the master page to use the appropriate charset. (The above tag used in the English master page also worked for Western European languages.)

For Japanese:

Code: Select all

	<head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift-JIS" /></head>

For Simplified Chinese:

Code: Select all

	<head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=GB2312" /></head>

For Korean:

Code: Select all

	<head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=EUC-KR" /></head>

We haven't reported the problem with Asian languages to tech support yet, as we just needed to solve the problem. We'll follow up with them on this today!

alt_jennifer · Post by **alt_jennifer** » Wed Oct 16, 2013 10:57 am

Ah great workaround! Glad you shared this

Bea Lac · Post by **Bea Lac** » Thu Oct 17, 2013 1:22 am

Thanks a lot Kellie. It works on my simplified chinese project.
I didn't have any Masperpage, so I add an empty one, including the code in the header. It looks fine : I can compare with the target generated with Flare 8.
However, I did not notice any pb in the european languages, but I keep it in mind to check the copyrights.
Some colleagues of mine will soon test the result for other exotic languages.

Thanks to all of us.
BÃ©atrice

Celine · Post by **Celine** » Thu Oct 17, 2013 2:36 am

Hello,
Thank you for this great workaround.
Since my problem was slightly different, I didn't have to create a master page; I just replaced a wrong tag in each damaged file by the one you gave us. The result is just fine.
Would you have the matching tag fot Traditional Chinese projects? Indeed, I guess the encoding is different.

CÃ©line

alt_jennifer · Post by **alt_jennifer** » Thu Oct 17, 2013 5:38 am

Hi CÃ©line,

Big5 is the most common encoding for Traditional Chinese, so this phrase should work:

Code: Select all

<head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Big5" /></head>

Bea Lac · Post by **Bea Lac** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 1:07 am

Hello,
I reported this issue to the FLare support and they found another solution. The coding character is OK when removing the "Add DOCTYPE declaration to generated topics" in the Advanced Tab of the CHM Target.
So, if your project does not need this option, it is enought to uncheck it.

alt_jennifer · Post by **alt_jennifer** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 6:54 am

Excellent! Thanks for the update Beatrice

techwriter31 · Post by **techwriter31** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 7:37 am

Yes, thanks! We tried un-checking the DOCTYPE declaration too (without any meta tag in the master page header). Unfortunately, it caused other characters to be garbled for us.

Boone · Post by **Boone** » Tue Jan 28, 2014 11:15 am

I'm having the same problem with Flare V9.1.2. My Japanese compile is garbled. I'm right in the middle of an important translation cycle, and I still have Chinese to compile

Unchecking the DOCTYPE delaration seems to correct the problem (without adding any meta tag to the master page) - but I'm worried about the post that said that caused other characters to be garbled.

This needs to be fixed! In the meantime, maybe it would be safer to compile Japanese and Chinese in Flare V8?

techwriter31 · Post by **techwriter31** » Thu Apr 24, 2014 1:52 pm

More Asian font issues in CHM files...

I'm using Flare 10.x to generate a Korean and Chinese CHM file.

Per the above thread, beginning in Flare 9, Asian languages were no longer displayed properly for CHM outputs.

To fix this issue, we added the following meta tag to the Korean CHM master page:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=EUC-KR" />

And added the following meta tag to the Chinese CHM master page:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=GB2312" />

We also need to include the following meta tag in our target file because our software application is stalling and sometimes crashing when this tag is not included:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7,8,9,10" />

However, when we include the X-UA-Compatible tag for the Korean and Chinese CHMs, all fonts are now displayed in bold. For the Korean projectâ€™s stylesheet, the specified font for the body class is â€œVerdanaâ€. I have tried changing this to â€œGulimâ€ to match our other Korean projects, but the bolding issue still occurs. This is not a problem for Japanese CHMs with the X-UA meta tag.

Has anyone else seen this issue and (hopefully) found a solution?

*UPDATE* - from what I can tell, the bold fonts are displayed in Flare 10 because of the new "Add meta tags to content" target option. If I build a CHM in Flare 10 without modifying anything, the fonts are bold. If I then go into the target file and uncheck/recheck the checkbox and generate the CHM, no more bold fonts! Unfortunately,this will be a manual process, but at least we can get rid of the bold appearance.

However, I also removed the charset meta tags (mentioned above), and now Korean, Chinese and Japanese characters appear correctly!

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Re: Wrong character display in asian CHM with Flare 9