Disappearing graphic in HTML Help output

[David__D]

I'm running FrameMaker 12.0.4, and I have a bunch of books that I am converting the HTML Help via the Publish command. I've been working on these books for a couple of years and thought they were pretty stable.

However, I have discovered a particular graphic in a particular book which is just simply not there in the HTML Help output.

There's no error message, everything else is as expected - this graphic is just missing!

It is a PNG in an anchored frame like pretty much all the others in the book. I am at a loss to understand why it's vanishing.

Any suggestions?

I've already tried opening and resaving the PNG in MS Paint (just in case it had some weird unsupported chunks - although I generated it from Illustrator CC 2014, don't see what could be wrong with it),

and I've tried deleting it from the page and reimporting it.

I've tried placing it in different parts of the page.

I've tried turning my computer off and back on again.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

And you’re creating a CHM or WebHelp? HTML Help seems to imply CHM, but I just wanted to be sure. You haven’t got it conditionalized in any way, do you?

[David__D]

Hi Jeff,

it's a CHM output, yes,

and no I've not got any conditional text in there.

I initially thought it was some weird behaviour because the other graphic in the topic had it's anchored frame set to "run into paragraph", and that seemed to be mucking up everything else after that.

For instance, I had another topic with a Run into Paragraph graphic, and all the auto-numbering vanished after the graphic in that topic.

However changing it to "Below Current Line" seems to have made no difference.

[Arnis Gubins]

Is it a PNG with indexed (PNG-8), 24-bit RGB or (PNG-24) or 32-bit RGB + alpha (PNG-32) colours? Any transparency or interlacing being used?

[David__D]

I suspected something along those lines too, Arnis.

I just opened the PNG in MS Paint and tried saving it as Windows BMP. Paint asked me "you will lose transparency if you do this, is that OK?" - so I thought I was onto something. However I imported the resulting .bmp into Frame and it's missing in the CHM file too! 😕

[Arnis Gubins]

Have you tried creating another simple AFrame on a separate page/file and importing that graphic there also to see if there are any contextual issues with your current location for the graphic?

[David__D]

I've now tried saving the graphic as a JPEG - still it is absent in the CHM output!  What sort of monster has Illustrator spawned?!? 😮

I have cut and pasted other graphics from other topics into the same location, and they do appear fine in the CHM, it does seem to be a problem with this particular graphic (which appears twice in my chapter file, and is missing twice in my CHM output).

The thing is, I'm sure this graphic was OK in a previous software release (before I upgraded to Frame 12)...

[Arnis Gubins]

Can you make a PDF of the pages containing the misbehaving graphic?

[David__D]

Yes Arnis, I can do a Save As PDF from the book and no graphics go missing, only the Publish > CHM route causes this.

The offending graphic was rasterised from a CAD-type drawing... I have a master PDF of it.

If I import the this master PDF into Frame, it appears OK in the CHM (albeit in a hideous rasterized badly-converted-to-RGB manner).

I also did a quick Save As Other > PNG of this PDF from Acrobat, and imported *that* PNG into Frame, and *that* appeared OK in the CHM. (However Acrobat's attempt to rasterize it looks a bit rough round the edges).

I seem to have narrowed it down to the nicely-dithered "web-optimised" PNG that Illustrator CC 2014 has made (or any subsequent re-saves of that from MS Paint to JPEG, PNG or BMP)  - for some reason, these all just vanish in the CHM output.

How extremely helpful of them! 😕 

[Arnis Gubins]

Please do file a bug report on this and provide a sample file so that the engineers can figure out what AI is doing differently with the PNG creation.

[David__D]

This morning I made a new 'web-optimised' PNG from Illustrator, (24 bit sRGB, with interlacing and transparency turned off) and that did work fine - I import it into Frame and it ends up fine in the CHM output.

So I will file a bug report with the recalcitrant PNG attached (and BMP and JPEG made from it) and see if Adobe can figure out what the problem is with them!

Illustrator's dither functions ("Art Optimized" or "Type Optimized" are lovely - they really make a useful difference to how good certain things look - so that's why I'd always prefer to use Illustrator to make PNGs like this if possible.
I appreciate that HTML itself, being inherently Internet Explorer 3 based (?) doesn't support PNG transparency - but in this case, it looks very much like the PNG never made it into the CHM in the first place, rather than that the Help viewer wasn't rendering it (as surely it would give a placeholder icon for a broken graphic in that case?)

[David__D]

This is Bug ID

Bug

3963842  in the bug base.

[feline_1973]

Is there any way to find out what happened to this bug?

(I came across my old thread here today, as I'm getting similar problems again now with Frame 2017)

[feline_1973]

If I go to https://tracker.adobe.com and log in, they seem to have ditched all the old bugs - my 3963842 ID brings up nothing.
Framemaker bugs are now prefixed with FRMAKER- and only go back as far as 2017.

[Arnis Gubins]

The info about the bugs and feature requests is on the FM forums main landing page.  The old bugs are in the Bugbase system (now read-only). You can still see these here: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm

[feline_1973]

Arnis, the bugbase site just gives me:

HTTP Status 400 - Required String parameter 'id' is not present

---

type Status report
message Required String parameter 'id' is not present
description The request sent by the client was syntactically incorrect.

---

Apache Tomcat

[Arnis Gubins]

Arrgghh! they keep changing links all the time.   [Sorry about that]

I'll send a note to the engineering team to fix this.

[Bob_Niland]

re: The offending graphic was rasterised from a CAD-type drawing... I have a master PDF of it.

If (lots of ifs):

• that CAD original (or the PDF instance) is entirely vector (no raster inclusions, such as texture maps), and
• FM12 supports SVG pass-thru to CHM (and I don't know about that), and
• all the expected Help readers support SVG (and older ones won't),

then you might try an SVG workflow, and see if it avoids the vanishing. It could also reduce the size of the output file, and would retain crisp original artwork detail at any zoom level.

[feline_1973]

Cheers Bob,

although I was more interested in why the original PNG didn't work - I already have a workaround which looks fine.

[feline_1973]

I'm getting this same type of thing happening in a CHM file again today - a PDF graphic in an anchored frame just appears as a blank frame in the CHM (it even still has the Alt Text tooltip from the frame, forlornly popping up over a blank white space...)

Distiller gets invoked when the CHM is being made, and the log file for the CHM creation merrily lists a JPG with a filename matching the PDF that has supposedly been created.

(This is still using the exact same Frame 12 and .sts settings and source files I was using in 2014, which mysteriously are no longer working - maybe Distiller is different in the meantime?!)

The old Bugbase link is still broken.

[feline_1973]

Still can't get to see the previous bugbase.... Adobe covering their tracks nicely

[feline_1973]

The "Object Properties" pod is doing the same thing.

[Arnis Gubins]

What's the "same thing" that the Object Pod is now doing? Have you logged this in the Tracker system?

[feline_1973]

sorry, that post about the minimizing Object Pod was in thw wrong thread

[Arnis Gubins]

FWIW, it's not the FM engineering team that looks after the bugbase. Someone has [incorrectly] added a re-direct, so the root of the link to bugbase.adobe.com now points to the Tracker system. I'll ping them again to see if this will [can?] be rectified.