PRB: Quotation Marks Missing from Compiled Help File

ID: Q110540

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows versions 3.0, 3.1
Microsoft Win32 Software Development Kit (SDK), versions 3.5, 3.51, 4.0

SYMPTOMS

After upgrading from Word for Windows 2.x to Word for Windows 6.x and rebuilding a Windows Help file with HCP.EXE or HC31.EXE, all of the quotation marks are missing from the Help file.

CAUSE

Word 6.x uses a special .RTF keyword to represent the quotation mark character, and the Help compiler does not understand the new .RTF keyword so it drops the character. The same problem occurs for the curly double quotation mark, single quotation mark, en dash (char 150), em dash (char 151), and the bullet character (char 149).

RESOLUTION

You can prevent this problem by turning off the "Smart Quotes" option in Word for Windows. The following three steps accomplish this:

Choose Options from Tools menu.

Select the AutoFormat tab.

In the Replace group box, clear the "Straight Quotes with Smart Quotes" check box, and choose OK.

If you wish to include smark quotes, bullets, em-dashes, and en-dashes in a Help file, you can open the file as text only and replace the RTF keywords with their ANSI hexadecimal equivalents, which are recognized by the help compiler.


   Find String       Replace String
   -----------       --------------
   \emdash           \'97"
   \endash           \'96"
   \bullet           \'95"
   \rdblquote        \'94"
   \ldblquote        \'93"
   \rquote           \'92"
   \lquote           \'91"

Make sure that there is a blank character included at the end of the Find String, but not in the Replace String.

This replacement must be made every time you edit and convert the text from document to RTF format.

Additional query words: 3.10 3.50 4.00

Keywords : TlsHlp
Version : :3.0,3.1; WINDOWS:3.5,3.51,4.0
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type :