Any 9004 errors?????

[Vikingweb]

Is anyone getting a 9004 error doing anything in FM9? If so please tell me what you are doing to get the error and what patch you are at and what version of Acrobat you have. Also be very clear on what you are doing to get that error step by step will be great. Trying to find fixes for people and nothing is working and no one is saying anything about it!!!

Thank you from a very tried tech support person.

[Guest]

Yzz, when you describe the crashes you mention "tab between them" to jump between documents. How exactly do you tab over, what keys do you use?

Second question. when you're editing your documents do you copy paragraphs, frames or graphics -- any copying -- from the master pages or from body pages, between documents, i.e. doing copy / cut / paste or just copy / paste or whatever?  The reason this might be significant is that FM has unique ID numbers for every object (graphic object, text object, etc etc, everything).  Because saving to MIF seems to clear out the gremlins for a short time, I'm wondering if the crashes are related to it getting mixed up with these IDs, because saving to MIF and reopening the files forces FM to re-evaluate the unique IDs and resolve them once again. Just saving the FM file doesn't do this re-solving step, which is why saving to MIF has often been known to clear out otherwise unidentified gremlins.

[saiceav]

Thanks Michael. I tried recreating my book and 'generated' files, but Frame continued to crash. I'm now going the .MIF route and Frame hasn't crashed for the past 2 hours, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Mala

[jcpal]

Yes, I am receiving Error 9004, began yesterday.  I am on Framemaker 9.03, just installed and downloaded the patch a few days ago.  I am running on a Vista OS. Version of Acrobat is 9 Pro.

Yesterday, I had approximately 9 files open and first received the error when going from one document to another.  I was changing fonts (Framemaker substitutes the wrong fonts), editing the document, and updating the cross references in each document.

I then closed all the documents except the one I was updating, thinking that it crashed because I had too much open.  It was working great until Framemaker needed to open a different document to update the cross reference, this document also had font changes made, then I received the error again.

This morning, I received the error again, when using WebWorks ePublisher Pro 2009, trying to general OLH.

The error states that a file was generated and to send that in, the problem I had and the main reason I have not yet reporting this error is because the error refers to a file that was generated but the location given doesn't exist.  I attempted to search my entire computer for this 'generated file' and was not successful at finding it.

Hope this helps

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

It's probably referring to a path like this:

C:\Documents and Settings\user_name\Application Data\Adobe\FrameMaker\9

right?

It's a normally hidden folder - in XP's Windows Explorer, change your Tools > Folder Options > View tab to Show hidden files and folders.

Jeff

[jcpal]

I am still receiving the 9004, 5230272, 8818444, 8821587 error, I have sent the log into support.  I am at a halt as to generating my help files because I cannot get past this error.

If there is anything you can suggest to get this up and running I would greatly appreciate it.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

So you've loaded the 9.03 patch?

Saved your documents out as MIF and re-loaded them?

There's got to be something you've added or taken away that's triggering this.

Have you tried creating a new document as a test?

Are you documents local or on a network drive - how deep is the path? There are limits - any odd characters in the filename or path?

If you're really desparate, you could try zipping them up & posting them for someone to have a look at.

[jcpal]

Thank you for your quick response and your help.  To answer your questions:

I have loaded the patch.  I was not aware of saving as MIF files, however I have thousands of files all together.  The smallest project I currently am working on is almost 1000 files.  Working on creating help for 3 products all together.  Having to open each file and save as MIF would take alot of time.

I have tried to create test documents however, because I am getting this error when I am going from tab to tab with several documents open, I can't always duplicate it. Is there a limit to how many docs you can have open.  Each file has several cross-references too, I open the files when testing the cross references.

Not sure if I mentioned this but the same error also comes up during generation of help files using WebWorks.

The documents are on local computer. As far as the path goes, what is the limit? No odd characters in the file names.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

You're getting a FM error in WebWorks? How's that possible?

I'm sure there's a limit on the number of open doc's you've got on the go in FM - it's limited I'm sure by the amount of RAM you've got installed. I've got 3 GB on my system and work quite fine with 5-10 open docs of 10 to 200 pages each. As a best practice, I would limit myself only keeping a few open at once. I would also turn on the auto-backup too.

You say you've got a 1000 files in a project - are they all in 1 book? Are you attempting book-wide updates when you crash? It's not that clear.

[Edward_Gilmore]

Hi,

          Firstly, my setup is as follows:

• 4GB RAM
• Windows XP SP3
• Dell Optiplex 755
• FM9.0p250
• Acrobat Pro 9.2.0

     Error codes we are getting:

• 9004, 6921852, 9677150, 0 (this is by far the most frequent, but doesn't seem to have any common factor)
• 9004, 5998329, 6045779, 6046680
• 9004, 6920460, 9676766, 0

     My team, 6 writers, all have very similar machines, and the same versions of both Windows, Acrobat and FM9.

We are all getting this 9004 error, with variations, but in very different situations.

• Writer 1 - Gets this error every time she deletes a variable. (every time)
• Writer 2 - Gets this error if he updates a book (intermittent)
• Writer 3 - Opens a chapter, the chapter title is replaced by question marks. Clicking anywhere in the chapter causes this error. However, selecting another para tag first, changes the chapter title to whatever format you selected and allows you to continue writing. Going back to the chapter line, and selecting our Chapter tag, causes FM9 to crash, with this error. If another writer opens the same file, on another PC, the chapter opens normally and everything is displayed as it should be, but this error will occur with another, different file, and be unreproducible by any other writer for the same chapter. (This one really has me. No idea what could possibly be this random.) Every writer on my team has experienced this with at least one of their files. But no two writers can generate the error on the same file. The chapter tag is totally normal: C: Chapter <$chapnum>  \
• Writer 4 - Gets the error if he has one file open, walks away to get coffee, comes back and resumes typing without saving the file before he left.

     It goes on and on. I've never encountered such an unstable product. We have managed to crash it in so many different ways and with such frequency that I am starting to think we should go back to FM7.

Has anybody heard anything back from Adobe Devs or Customer Support on this? I've logged a request, but... so far all I'm seeing on the various forums is

people talking about the problems, and no word on solutions.

Thanks.

Ed

[Art Campbell]

As noted in earlier posts, saving as MIF cleans out most types of hidden characters and file corruption, such as that created by importing content from Word files...

You can pretty easily process hundreds or thousands of files by either creating meta-books that list large groups of files or using FrameScript on directories. A Wash-to-MIF utility is set up with you install the MIF2Go program (or eval) from omsys.com.

Also... is the Adobe PDF printer set as the default printer on your systems? The note you included about question marks displaying instead of characters would make me think that some fonts are occasionally disappearing from systems as they would if a hard printer or networked printer was the system default.

Art

[Edward_Gilmore]

Hi Art,

        Thanks for the prompt response, but saving as MIF didn't help and,

if anything, setting the PDF printer as default

only hastened the question-mark crash. With my network printer as default,

it doesn't crash until I clicked somewhere

in the file, but with the pdf printer defined, it crashed the second it

opened.

Kind regards,

Edward

[Arnis Gubins]

Edward,

If FM crashes immediatley when the Adobe PDF printer instance is set as your default, then there's a configuration problem. This really should be your default printer when running FM. There's even a third-party utility to ensure that it is: see setPrint at  http://www.sundorne.com/FrameMaker/Freeware/setPrint.htm

Try to verify that the Adobe PDF is working by printing to it from some other application, such as Word or using the "Print Test Page" from the Printer Properties dialogue. You might have to re-install it using the Windows "Add Printer" routines and make sure that that it is hooked to the Adobe PDF Print Monitor port.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

That smells pretty fishy to me - the AdobePDF printer instance should be fine & cause no crashing. I use the SetPrint plug-in to make sure that it's set as the default only for FM (and not for any other app). Have you tried a reinstall of the TCS?

[Edward_Gilmore]

Sorry, forgot to say, I'll give the meta-book idea a go after the weekend.

Interesting suggestion.

Cheers.

Kind regards,

Edward

[Guest]

Ed, I'd concur with the direction Art is suggesting that at least part of your problem(s) could be due to font issues.

Some other questions to consider: What kinds of fonts do you use, TTF, OTF, Type1? Were the files migrated from earlier FM versions, or are they brand new FM9? Do you use Symbol font and perhaps other special characters, accents, etc?

The reason I ask is that one thing I came across recently is that the "Adobe PDF" printer didn't get the path to FM9's fonts added to it when FM9 was installed. In both cases the system had the full Acrobat 9.x installed, not FM's distiller plug-in.

In a somewhat related vein,  FM9's Symbol font seems to have a different (or smaller, or mal-formed, not sure which) set of characters as compared to FM8, which resulted in one FM9-only system displaying question marks for inch and foot (aka single prime and double-prime).  Interestingly the marks printed to PDF perfectly, the question marks only affected FM's screen display. The FM9-only system had this problem, a different FM8+FM9 installed system displayed them fine.

Actually, now that I think of it, when this question mark problem first occurred on the FM9-only system I =did= have a couple of times when I thought the marks were displayed correctly and then the next time I thought to look for them, they were question marks again.  In any case getting the paths corrected and copying the FM8 Symbol font into the FM9 directory stabilized the display.

What printer do you have set as your system default when you're using FM?  There can often be font conflicts when the default printer has fonts that are duplicated by locally installed fonts.

Sheila

[Art_Campbell1]

Edward,

I suggest that you keep the Adobe Acrobat printer as your system default for a while because it's generally a known-good printer setup that others can duplicate. It makes debugging much easier -- you may have noticed how I and other posters sort of narrowed in on the fonts / printer config being the, or one of the major problems.

It would make trouble-shooting much easier if the PDF printer is the default.

In addition to answering the question about the font files heritage, could you also tell us a bit about the files history? Are they older version Frame files, imported from Word or other  programs, or all new FM 9 files? Do any of them contain objects that have been imported using OLE links?

And finally, I'm guessing that due to the number of files, they're on a network server. Network delays when opening and validating stacks of files
can often trigger a crash. So you may want to try an experiment and copy one book's worth of files to a local hard drive.  Bruce Foster's Archive program is a quick and easy way to move a book as well as a great tool.

Cheers,

Art

[Scotj]

I have this exact same error - I will be watching this tread intently!

I am running 9.0.3 under windows 7 64-bit. Everything works great except for a crash after saving a document and then switching. I've seen a few times I get the error just by saving.

[YZZYX]

More info on the crashes....

I've noticed that when I open 2 documents and immediately tab between them, FM does not crash. But as soon as I scroll-down through one of the docs, then FM crashes when I tab to the other doc. This is very consistent.

A recent crash produced a pop-up box that said:

Crash in VScrollTrack: 7395

Hope this helps.

[Edward_Gilmore]

More madness. We've washed all our files by  converting to mif to fm, to no avail. The issue does

not appear to be anything at all to do with our files. It seems to be entirely down to the unstable nature of the

product.

Most recently, one of my writers was copying and pasting from one

doc to another, and FM9 crashed. Then it would not restart.

Watching the splashscreen, to see where it was when the crash occurred,

we noticed it crashed when Localisation was listed above the splashscreen.

So, assuming it was a config error, we went through the ini files, commenting out

some values, editing others, to no avail.

So, as a last resort (it was a release day and we had no more time for messing around)

we just renamed the C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Adobe\Linguistics

directory. Lo and behold, FM9 starts up and runs perfectly happily. Well, I say happily...

So far everyone has been talking about fonts and printers as the issue, but all my writers are using

the same printer. Adobe PDF, and all have an identical font set installed.

The impression I'm getting here is not of corrupted fonts, or unsupported printer instances,

but of a Beta product rushed to market. All crashes happen while performing the most ordinary tasks.

It's not like we're trying to push the edge of the FM envelope here.

I've written to Adobe support but have heard nothing back. Has anybody heard anything from them on

this issue?

Ed

[Gay_Alson]

FM 9.0 is crashing on me almost every day. At first I assumed maybe I just have bad work habits, too many apps open at a time, pushing the envelope of FM's capabilities, etc.  But today all I did was try to save a FM 9.0 file in .rtf format and FM crashed again. (Internal Error: 9004, 6921852, 9677150, 0)  I sent the error log to Adobe, as requested, but after that I couldn't even open FM. I've tried three times and each time it gets as far as the localization step in the launch progress window and then crashes.

Ed, I was interested to note that your experience was similar to mine as to where FM was in its launch procedure when it crashed, so I thought I'd try your workaround and to my delight, it works! (Thank you, thank you.)  I couldn't figure out why localization could be a problem, as the file isn't localized. But when I looked in the Localization folder, I saw that all of the FM dictionaries are there -- and the last thing I did before FM crashed the last time was to run a spell check. Probably NOT coincidence, eh? (Not that I know what any of it means, mind you...)

BTW, I'm running XP Pro, SP 3, FM 9.0 with patch 250, I have sufficient RAM and HD space (or so I've thought). Can't figure out what FM's problem is, but I'm seriously regretting lobbying my boss for an upgrade. 7.2 was much, much more robust.

~~Gay

[Arnis Gubins]

Gay,

If FM is crashing at the "Localization" step, then either something has corrupted the dictionaries, your personal dictionary files or the pointers to those in the maker.ini are messed up. When you did the Spell-check, did you add words to your dictionary or the document?

Check that the maker.ini entries for site and user dictionaries to make sure that they're where they should be. See this TechComm blog about FM9's dicitonaries; they are different: http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2009/12/dictionaries_in_fm9.html

[Arnis Gubins]

Regarding the save as RTF from FM, I know you've heard it before, but really do try to get Mif2go from Omni Systems: http://www.omsys.com/dcl/mif2gopg.htm

The FM RTF export filters (to be polite) are just not up to anything remotely complex in layout and styles.

[Gay_Alson]

Thanks for the posts, Arnis,

I won't try to save as RTF again and will see what I can do about acquiring MIF2GO.

Re the dictionaries, yes, when I ran Spell Check, I added several words, some to my dictionary and some to the document dictionary. There's nothing in maker.ini about dictionaries, although there are several [Spelling] settings.

One oddity I just noticed is that although I renamed the Linguistics folder yesterday, it's ba-a-ack. The renamed folder is still there, and all four dictionary folders under it have 35 language subfolders in them, although the four dictionary folders under new Linguistics folder have only two subfolders (all and eng).

I don't know what it means but in the renamed folder, under FMDocDictionary, the "all" subfolder has two .txt files (instead of the "clam" files everywhere else): added.txt and excluded.txt, both of which are timestamped around 3:00 yesterday afternoon. To me, that indicates these files were generated when I ran Spell Check and added several words. However, this is one of the subfolders in the RENAMED Linguistics folder, meaning I'd already had the problems with FM crashing on launch (because that's when I searched the FM Forum and found Ed's workaround of renaming the Linguistics folder).

BTW, maker.ini is on the root of C:\Documents and Settings\galson\Application Data\Adobe\FrameMaker\9, along with all the error logs from FM crashes. These logs began on the March 18, and now number 12 -- EIGHT of which occurred yesterday.    >:~(

Thanks again for your posts, Arnis, I always appreciate both your help and your expertise.

~~Gay

[Arnis Gubins]

Gay,

There are two versions of the maker.ini. The main(global) one is in the folder that the FM application is installed (\Program Files\Adobe\FrameMaker 9) and the customized user entries are in the \Settings and Documents\[username]\Applications Data... path.

The dictionary entries should be in the [Files] section of the main maker.ini file, something like this:

UserDictionary=

SiteDictionary=dict\site.dct

The critical entry is that you must have *something* in the SiteDictionary line, even if the file doesn't exist.

You also shouldn't be playing around with the Linguistics folder. FM tried to re-create it, but it's now missing all of your other language files (that's why you only have all and eng sub-folders). I would restore these, if you didn't have any issues prior to adding words via the SpellChecker.

Note: if you manually added words to the Site.dct files, as per the old way in FM, then it's critical that all entries have a hyphen in them, even if the word doesn't require one, i.e. place it at the front:

"-dumbchecker" or "dumb-checker" but not "dumbchecker". This will also cause FM9 to crash.

The dictionaries and spell-checker are setup differently with FM9, so don't do things the old way - this will tend to make FM9 crash.

[Gay_Alson]

Hi Arnis,

You suggest restoring the language files if I "didn't have any issues prior to adding words via the SpellChecker", but I DO think the crashes happened after I renamed the Linguistics folder. I'm not sure if you're suggesting that I restore the original Linguistics folder or just the language subfolders under it (by copying them over to the renamed Linguistics folder, I assume). I think I'll try the latter first and if that doesn't work, I'll restore the original Linguistics folder by (1) deleting the new FM-generated one and then (2) renaming the renamed Linguistics folder back to just "Linguistics" so all of the subfolders within are as they were. If that reproduces the FM-crash-on-launch scenario again, I'll have to go back to what I did yesterday but I will try your suggestion.

There are some differences in the various dictionaries but both the original and renamed Linguistics folders contain files (either "added.txt" or "added.clam") in the FM Site Dictionaries, which you say is the critical issue -- and both of the "added.txt" files are identical (and totally hyphenated).

So now I'm off to try to restore the folder structure that I messed up yesterday.

Thank you again for taking your time to help me, Arnis. I'll let you know how this all works out.

~~Gay