Mouseover hover text not appearing when save as web page

[Hey Ken]

Chris:

First off, thanks for all the tips, tricks, and techniques I've learned from your website over the years.  You da man!

Here's my issue: I'm migrating from Visio 2007 to Visio 2010 and ran into a problem.  I set up a shape with mouseover hover text which displays fine in both Visio 2007 and 2010.  The mouseover also works fine in every browser I've tried when I publish from Visio 2007.  The problem is that when I save the drawing as a web page in V2010: when I mouseover the shape in the browser I get the text of the shape and not the hover text.  The problem occurs in IE 9 and Firefox 13.0.1, so it appears to be browser independent.

To get the hover text, on the ShapeSheet I have User.visEquivTitle set to "Comment" (no quotes), and the comment field in the Miscellaneous section set to the hover text.  I publish with no publishing options selected (although I hacked at it some by turning them on and off, to no avail) with files organized in a supporting folder.  I'm using Visio Professional 2010 version 14.0.6123.5001 (32 bit).

Any insights?

Thanks,

- Ken

[aledlund]

maybe this will help

http://visualsignals.typepad.co.uk/vislog/2012/02/no-mouseover-with-visequivtitle.html#more

al

[Hey Ken]

aledlund:

Thanks for the tip, but it did not make any difference.  User.visEquivTitle.Prompt already contained =Comment, so I added a space before it (=" " & Comment), but it didn't matter.  I also tried putting a value into User.visEquivTitle.Value, also with no effect.  Good thought, though.

- Ken

[JohnGoldsmith]

Hello Ken,

What output formats are you using?  Also, are you able to zip some sample output files that exhibits the problem?

Best regards

John

[Hey Ken]

John:

Thanks for the reply.

I was using the default output format (XAML) until you brought it up, so I hacked at it a bit and found out a few items about the web output:

• Under XAML the hover text does not work (my initial concern);
• Under SVG the shape name is used as the hover text (does not address my concern);
• For all other formats (JPG, GIF, PNG, VML) the hover text does work, but some hyperlinks inexplicably stopped working (solved my concern, but introduced another).

I hacked at the hyperlink problem a bit and found (are you ready?) the existence of a User.visEquivTitle cell causes the hyperlink to stop working on the web page.  Take away the visEquivTitle name and it works fine.  Go figure.

Regardless, I can programmatically set things up so that you either get hover text or hyperlinks, but not both.  Fortunately, the nature of my Visio application is such that I can live with that.  Let's hope I never need to do both simultaneously!

Thanks again for the reply.  You put me on the path to solving MY problem, if not THE problem.

While I have you on the line, let me ask a trivial followup question: I read someplace that dynamic graphics formats like VML or SVG are recommended, while fixed format like JPG, PNG or GIF are not.  Does it really matter?  As a result of my hacking experience, I'm now planning to use JPG not only because my hover text and hyperlinks both work, but also because I found it builds and renders significantly faster.

   - Ken

[Hey Ken]

   This hover text stuff is killing me.

   All of a sudden, any new hover text I was adding would not display in the browser.  Took a bit of wrangling before I stumbled across the answer.  In order for the hover text to appear, it is necessary to have a hyperlink section on the shapesheet.  The cells can be blank (in fact they have to be--the presence of a hyperlink overrides the hover text), but the section must be there.  It turned out that I did it to myself. When I was cleaning up the code after solving the earlier problem, I removed the apparently-meaningless line that added a blank line to the hyperlink section.  Why have a link that's not there?  Now I know why. 

   While I'm chronicling my hover woes, here's another one I solved then broke then re-solved: the mouseover hover text string would not display completely in the browser.  It displayed a short snippet of random length followed by the ellipsis ("...") and truncated the rest.  It turned out that Visio 2010 can handle 255 characters before resorting to the ellipsis, but Firefox and IE go right to the ellipses after 64 characters.  Anything 64 or shorter works fine, but 65 is right out.

   Sheesh.

   - Ken