Flickering scroll bars

Barb · Post by **Barb** » Mon Oct 29, 2012 10:38 am

Hello from Canada!

I am wondering if anyone else has encountered the problem of flickering scroll bars in the table of contents. It appears in my Preview (in the XML editor), and then when I Build/Publish/View the target it also appears. The target is set up as output type: HTML5.

Does anyone know how I can get rid of the flickering scroll bars??

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!!
Barb

Post by **LTinker68** » Mon Oct 29, 2012 10:42 am

Welcome to the forums.

What browser(s) have you seen this in? Does it happen from other computers?

And what OS are you using?

Barb · Post by **Barb** » Mon Oct 29, 2012 10:58 am

Thanks Lisa!

Yes, this happens from other computers.
Browser: Internet Explorer 8
OS: Windows XP

Barb

sfoley · Post by **sfoley** » Mon Oct 29, 2012 11:27 am

Barb wrote:Does anyone know how I can get rid of the flickering scroll bars??

Usually when I've seen this happen, it's for one of three reasons:

1- The web page takes a long time to load, or has dynamic content (for example, AJAX). However, the scroll bars stop flickering when the page finishes loading.
2- The web page triggers IE's compatibility mode and has an element that uses the CSS property width: 100%.
3- The scroll bars flicker when the mouse is moved around the page because style classes are being switched out.

This is a pretty tricky bug to solve, and I recommend you ask someone with web development experience for help. A few things you can try, though:

1- Try to slim down the content you're delivering so that it arrives more quickly.
2- Use a non-relative width for whatever element is currently set to 100%.
3- Remove any hover or mouseover effects that you've added from your project CSS file or scripts.

For a quick and dirty fix, you can also add overflow-y: scroll to the style for the Table of Contents element, but this means there will always be a scrollbar (even if one isn't needed). You'll also need to make this change after every build, use a post-build script, or modify your target template files. You can search the forums for ways to do this.

Barb · Post by **Barb** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 2:07 pm

Thank you so much for your suggestions! I am working with our IT dept to see what will work for us.

Thanks!
Barb

wclass · Post by **wclass** » Wed Oct 31, 2012 6:25 pm

I have seen this happen with IE8 when it is in compatibility mode.
We have that mode set for some of our old applications, and so we are hesitant to do a global reset (though we will encourage all apps to be updated).

If you find a way to open a webhelp file and set that window/session to NOT be in compatibility mode, then I'd love to hear about it.

Post by **RamonS** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 4:32 am

Noticed this in FF the other day and the trick was to disable graphic hardware acceleration. Not sure if this has anything to do with this case, but something to check. For IE that is in Internet Options on the Advanced tab and called "Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering".

sfoley · Post by **sfoley** » Thu Nov 01, 2012 8:17 am

wclass wrote:If you find a way to open a webhelp file and set that window/session to NOT be in compatibility mode, then I'd love to hear about it.

Try adding this line inside the <head> element (again, will need to do a post-build fix or modify default files):

Code: Select all

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

This should force IE to use standards mode when rendering that document. There's a lot of documentation available here if you want to read more.

Jim · Post by **Jim** » Tue Nov 06, 2012 2:03 pm

sfoley wrote:
Try adding this line inside the <head> element (again, will need to do a post-build fix or modify default files):
Code: Select all
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
This should force IE to use standards mode when rendering that document..

I had the same issue, and this resolved it! Thank you!

Note: You only have to add this line to the main page that MadCap creates following the Build process (by default, its Default.htm located in the HTML5 output folder). You do not need to add it to every source file in your project.

Thanks again sfoley!

Barb · Post by **Barb** » Tue Nov 13, 2012 5:16 pm

Hi,

Thank you everyone for all of your suggestions! I really appreciate it.

We are still looking into this, and once we have resolved this issue I will let you know what worked for us.

Thanks!
Barb

Barb · Post by **Barb** » Tue Nov 20, 2012 9:20 am

Hey! Problem solved!!! We were still running on Internet Explorer 7. We do not have the problem with the flickering scroll bars when we view it in Firefox! And I'm sure it would also look fine on IE 8 or 9. (I've only tried with Firefox so far.)

I have now changed my browser, and hope to soon have our other internal users updated to a newer browser. Our external users have minimum technical requirements, but funny thing is our own internal users are not all even up to date with what we expect from our external users, go figure

Thank you to everyone who offered suggestions and lead us down the path of checking into our browser.

Thanks!!!
Barb

Post by **SteveS** » Tue Nov 20, 2012 1:36 pm

Barb wrote:...but funny thing is our own internal users are not all even up to date with what we expect from our external users, go figure ...

Happens a lot, developers aren't the ones who make the purchasing decisions, although they do provide the minimum specs for the customers . More's the pity, I've yet to meet a developer who thinks even an average specced machine is good enough, they're usually as abad as gamers!

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