Extended ASCII characters don't work in WinHelp

Problem

ASCII characters (characters in the range 128-256) do not work in Topic headings, hypertext links and related topic links when publishing to WinHelp. Instead a question mark (?) is displayed. For example the characters ä and ü are replaced with question marks.

Reason

The RTF file created by Author-it to be compiled into a WinHelp file is encoded as Unicode. While the RTF is valid, the WinHelp compiler doesn't understand it.

Solution

While we investigate this problem further, we recommend the following steps to work around the problem:

1. Install the Microsoft Help Workshop on your computer.
2. Publishing your book to WinHelp.
3. Open the folder containing WinHelp file.
4. Open the RTF file in Microsoft Word.
5. Save the RTF file. Microsoft Word will change the Unicode encoding of the ASCII characters in the range 128-256 and save them as extended ASCII instead.
6. Open the HPJ file in Microsoft Help Workshop.
7. From the File menu, select Compile.
8. From the Compile dialog, select Compile.

You should now have a valid WinHelp file, that includes extended ASCII characters.