Microsoft KB Archive/71353

HELPMAKE Generates H1303 Error for New RTF Attributes ID Number: Q71353

1.05 1.06 | 1.05 1.06 MS-DOS | OS/2 buglist1.05 buglist1.06 fixlist1.07

Summary:

When new RTF attributes are introduced in such products as Word for Windows, they may not be recognized by the HELPMAKE utility. Attempting to compile a source file with these new attributes will result in the following HELPMAKE error:

fatal error H1303: unknown RTF attribute

More Information:

Rich Text Format (RTF) is a Microsoft word-processing format. The HELPMAKE utility can apply only a limited subset of the full RTF capabilities, but it is designed to ignore any RTF code that is not a part of this subset. Unfortunately, HELPMAKE can do this only if it recognizes an attribute as being outside of this subset.

The new RTF attributes that have been added to Word for Windows, Word for OS/2, and Word for DOS version 5.50 are too new to have been incorporated into HELPMAKE versions 1.05 and 1.06. Therefore, these versions cannot recognize the attributes, which means they cannot ignore them properly and the H1303 error is generated.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in HELPMAKE versions 1.05 and 1.06. This problem was corrected in HELPMAKE version 1.07.

Nevertheless, this problem may reappear at any time if new RTF attributes that have been created are compiled with a version of the HELPMAKE utility that does not include the updated RTF syntax. (Note that some RTF codes produced by Microsoft Word for the Macintosh are still not recognized by HELPMAKE.)

The following sample help source file, TEST.RTF, is a simplified version of the type of help file such as that which may be created using Word for Windows and includes an embedded field. Because HELPMAKE versions 1.05 and 1.06 do not recognize the attribute, the following error will be generated when TEST.RTF is compiled with these versions:

fatal error H1303: unknown RTF attribute

Sample Code
/* Compile options needed: /e /s1 /otest.hlp test.rtf */

{ >> Date1

AM/PM&quot;}{/12/21/91 11:59 PM}} >> Date2

AM/PM&quot;}{/12/22/91 12:00 AM}} }