How to prevent frequent crashes of one particular .fm file?

Forum|Forum|11 years ago
November 24, 2014
7 replies
302 views

FM 10 is generally stable for me, EXCEPT that one of my files crashes OFTEN and has to be resurrected from a backup. I can't afford to continue in the same pattern of crashing and retrieving backups.

I THINK the problem is the complexity of conditional text applied to tables, rows within tables, and figures. And the file has at least two dozen left-over non-used conditions. Now I'm just trying to think of a permanent fix. What do you think is the most useful action: splitting the file into two chapters, deleting unused conditions, using fewer conditions, re-creating tables so that rows don't need conditions, .... ANYTHING ELSE?

Thanks in advance.

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Bob_Niland

Community Expert

Have you tried a MIF wash?

B

babloomAuthor

Participating Frequently

While I sincerely appreciate your suggestion, I am not big on trying unsupported utilities when the documentation is almost non-existent, and when I don't even know that it's targeted to my problem.

So let me ask specifically, ... do you have any experience with conditional text being found to be the cause of file-crashing? Thanks

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

> ... not big on trying unsupported utilities ...

MIF is a standard alternative file format for Framemaker books and documents, supported by the FM app.

Saving as MIF to .mif creates a human-readable version of your file in MIF markup (for which there is a reasonably recent reference manual, but you don't need to be able to read any MIF to run a MIF wash).

The process of saving as MIF, restarting Frame, then reopening the MIF guarantees a syntactically correct data structure. Any corrupt or non-compliant structures are eliminated.

In FM11 and 12, Adobe supplies an optional extension to perform an explicit "MIF Wash" as a menu operation.

Doing it the old school way may be safer, as exiting FM assures that any data structure issues in FM itself are flushed away.

> ... do you have any experience with conditional text being found to be the cause of file-crashing?

Don't know. We have many large books that often crash (usually during or after an anchored frame bottom border pulldown). These files all have multiple Conditions. We've not invested the time to try to isolate the cause of the crashes (in part because it's so random, and relatively infrequent). I wouldn't rule out Conditions as part of the problem.

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