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Inspiring
April 10, 2008
Question

Blank Printed DOC

  • April 10, 2008
  • 10 replies
  • 1463 views


I have experimented with producing BUILD-specific documents from a large web help file. I have tried and tried to get the right BUILD statement, but I end up with a blank document with only the title page, no TOC. As it is running a message flashes: Failure to build one chapter.

Then I tried to get a complete paper document (NO BUILD EXPRESSION) from the batch generate, and RoboHelp chokes and gives me the same blank document.

Any suggestions for a fix would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
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10 replies

Inspiring
April 11, 2008
I have everything on my hard drive now. When I have to publish WEB HELP to production, I will be copying the directory to a shared drive that an engineer can then copy to production.

The PRINT DOCUMENT function works fine when I do it all locally.

Thanks so much for all of the time and patience.

Sandy
MergeThis
Inspiring
April 11, 2008
Just in case you're still unclear:

Generate output to your local machine.

Publish to as many shared drive locations as you want. BTW, when you publish, RH only publishes the changed files (unless you instruct it to republish all).


Good luck,
Leon
RoboColum_n_
Legend
April 11, 2008
As Leon says, networks and RH are a no-no. Think of it as Russian Roulette. You may have a eight barreled gun and you are fine for the first seven shots but then....
Inspiring
April 10, 2008
Yes.

Robohelp is installed locally.
All projects are on a network drive that I am mapped to.
I have successfully generated a very small webhelp to word document with this configuration. It was printed to the SSL\Printed Documentation folder on the network.

I am going to copy all my working project directories to my local drive. Then I will try to generate a word document to the local directory (SSL\Printed Documentation).

Will let you know if that fixes things.....

Thanks for your time and patience
MergeThis
Inspiring
April 10, 2008
"All projects are on a network drive that I am mapped to."

No, no, no, no, no... A mapped drive is still a network, and RH uses an Access database (which mostly chokes on networks). Yes, yes, yes, you may say you've been working like this with no problems before, but we've heard that over and over on this forum.

You can store your projects on a server all you want, but work on the project on your local machine.


Good luck,
Leon
Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 10, 2008
Another thought, is your RH project on the network?

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Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 10, 2008
Don't give up on it yet.

Medium or low are OK, just not High.

You should never generate to the network.

Delete the chapter that is failing and try again. How big a document would this be?

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Inspiring
April 10, 2008
RH was installed after WORD.

MACRO security level was set to LOW. I changed it to Medium.

I have tried printing to word locally (NOT ACROSS NETWORK) but that still did not fix it.

Another much smaller (20 page document) was generated flawlessly just yesterday. HOWEVER, I had no build tags and was generating the entire web help.

I am afraid I am going to have to create mini-projects for each of my user communities--that is about 6 projects and means no more single source.....


Sandy
Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 10, 2008
I wonder if RH was installed before or after Word?

What is the macro security level setting in Word? If it is High, set it to Medium.

RH was installed after Word and the service pack and the macro level is medium, then try Colum's suggestion.



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Inspiring
April 10, 2008
RoboHelp HTML 5.0.2 Build 801


Word 2003 SP3
Peter Grainge
Community Expert
Community Expert
April 10, 2008
What versions of Word and RH?

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RoboColum_n_
Legend
April 10, 2008
Create a new project, import chapter one and compile. Does this work successfully?