CHM text size varies depending on where it's viewed

[CathyT]

I am generating HTML help and have a copyright footer on my master page whose type I want to be smaller than that of the rest of the text. No matter what I do, it remains the same size as the regular text. I finally sent it to a couple of other people, and when they view it, they get the results I was looking for.

I am responsible for the look of our help, and for me to be unable to see what most people are seeing is a very bad situation. The only information I've been able to find in the forums that addresses anything like this is the "Patch stylesheets..." setting on the Advanced tab of the target, but it doesn't apply to my situation. I tried it anyway just to check, and nothing changed. I've checked my computer's monitor settings and nothing varies from anyone else's settings as far as default type size.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this to happen?

[GregStenhouse]

Are you using points, em, % or some other unit for the font size? If em or %, then the user can modify the text size using view>text size (IE), view>zoom (Firefox), or ctrl + the scroll wheel. It may be that your footnote text is scalable and your body text is a fixed pt size, which means text zoom settings on someone's PC can make both apear the same size.

[KevinDAmery]

If that doesn't work, post the style code for both the body text and the copyright footer and we can check if we see anything that might cause sizing issues.

[CathyT]

Believe it or not, this is the first chance I've had to address your reply. All the text is fixed size (points for print output and pixels for online). I'm going to make an experimental project and change the online to percentages and see if that does the trick.

Thank you so much for your help. I'll let you know what happens.

[Madcap Guru]

IF you are still having problems you may want to open a ticket with support, do you have any masterpages applied to your target that could be overwriting it?

[CathyT]

The thing is, the CHM appears as I've designed it, on other people's workstations. Mine is the one that has the problem, and it's a problem because I'm the one responsible for maintaining and changing our Flare styles. I don't think it's a Flare problem, at least in the sense of bad code or anything like that, because it works elsewhere. I'm wondering what could be in my system that would prevent the CHM from appearing to me the way it does to everyone else. All my monitor settings are good, I can change type size in browsers, etc.

Last night I made a new CSS file using all relative sizes, figuring that even if the type appeared too large, at least it would be proportional. But it didn't make any difference. The heading styles are working, but everything under the p tag appears to be the same size. Everything approximates my specs in the XML editor, but preview and output are incorrect. It's the same thing with leading and paragraph spacing. No matter what values I put in (and I'm varying by hundreds of percent to make it obvious) the spacing remains constant.

[Norlinda]

Hi Cathy T, wondering if you found a solution for this issue and if you did could you please post it here?
I'm experiencing the same issue. On everyone's workstation, the font sizes appear normal, but on my computer, the CHM file displays a large font size by default. I work with a variety of project files, and in one project, the font even appears larger than normal in Flare itself.
Thanks.

[i-tietz]

Try deleting a file called hh.dat (somewhere in your Windows user folder) and the history of the Internet Explorer.

[Norlinda]

Thanks for your reply.
I tried deleting the file but I still have the problem.

[paul55]

You could try this: close the HTML Help help viewer; start Internet Explorer; do View -> Text Size -> Medium; close IE. Then start up the help viewer again and see if that has reset the font size (it did for me when I tried it just now).

Also, on the help viewer's toolbar you can enable the Font button (go to the Flare skins editor, under the HTML Help section). Clicking on that will cycle through the 5 text sizes (Smallest...Largest) inside the help viewer.

As another poster mentioned, in IE you can also change the relative font size by holding down Ctrl and using the mouse wheel. This works in the CHM viewer as well, if the HTML portion of the window has the focus (i.e. you have to click in it first).

HTH,

-Paul

[i-tietz]

Because of this thread I yesterday tried to find a chm file with a font button in the toolbar. I found one and switched the font size around a bit and closed it lateron.
Today I noticed that in the project I'm currently working on the preview in Flare showed me an increased font size.

So I went back to that chm file with the font button and switched it to the medium size. Now the preview and all the chm files concerned show me the normal font size again ... I honestly don't know where Windows stores that information (not in the IE and not in hh.dat) but it obviously does ...

Maybe you should try that, too?