Non-ascii characters freezes webhelp classic reading pane

[mross]

At times, browsers will "freeze" and not display content in the webhelp classic topic pane if the source XML had non-ascii characters. For example curly quotes, curly apostrophe, em dash, ellipsis, symbols.

If we set autocorrect to replace a curly quote with a straight quote and so on, that would take care of any newly created content that obtained source from someother source like MS Word, but will we have to run batch find/replace to change all these non-ascii characters in the XML?

we are using default <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> encoding on XML

[Costin]

Hello,

We are not aware of such issues. The WebHelp Classic output should handle correctly also non-ascii characters.
We have just double checked this, but we could not reproduce the freezes.

To test, we used the latest version of oXygen to publish the WebHelp Classic output and checked the result on three different browsers (IE, Firefox, Google Chrome), all of them at the current version.

What version of oXygen did you use?
Could you let us know what internet browsers and which versions of them did you encounter this issue on?
Also, how exactly you inserted the non-ascii characters in the source file?

If this issue persists, you could send us a sample file that you can reproduce the issue with and we will have a look at it and try to see if there is something peculiar that triggers the browser freeze.

Regards,
Costin

[mross]

Created with Oxygen 21.1, Oxygen DITA OT 3.3.1, default webhelp classic transform.

non-ascii characters inserted three ways:
1. copy paste from MS Word source.
2. manually typed from Dell 64 bit Windows 10 pro keyboard
4. manually inserted with Oxygen character dialog box.

With Oxygen Editor, select the folder with source and output, run this xpath expression on .xml, .ditamap, and .html:
[^\x00-\x7F]+

The output detects non-ascii characters. It is these non-ascii characers in the .html that are causing the browser to freeze and not load the reading pane content.

Will follow up with email with attached source and output.