Framemaker 10 crashes when changing conditional text display settings

Report · Nov 08, 2011

Hi everyone

We're getting Framemaker 10 crashes when changing conditional text display settings on some files (3 so far out of several hundred). It crashes, for example, when we toggle between build expressions and/or Show As Per Condition settings. Depending on file and display settings, it crashes after anything between 1 and 40ish display actions. 40 we could live with; 1 or 2 makes the files unusable.

The error message is "Internal error 10014, 5988022, 5988444, 4795055".

Sometimes you have to forcefully close FM after this. Other times, FM closes itself and we get another dialog box:

"The instruction at "0x033e76e0" referenced memory at "0x0d9af94b". The memory could not be "read"."

Or sometimes, 'the memory could not be "written"'. And once, it was "the exception Privileged instruction. (0xc0000096) occurred in the application at location 0x0c76e57a."

The hex values vary from PC to PC but the actions to cause each crash don't.

The files have multi-page tables with conditional text in the tables. They were created in Frame 7.0 and upgraded straight to 10.0.0. We're using conditional text with 11 conditions and 8 boolean expressions.

I've trawled the forum and frameusers list, and tried:

* 5 different machines - they all see the issue.

* washing through MIF - the MIF files crash FM too.

* working locally instead of across the network - no difference.

* showing all conditions and then looking in the Mif files for any text in a flow called "Hidden". There wasn't any.

* saving after every change of conditional text display setting. This sometimes works but it's a pain!

* removing all the paragraph overrides in the file. This worked for 1 out of 3 files.

* removing the tables and/or removing conditional text from them. This worked for 2 out of 3 files, and improved the 3rd, but I don't think it's a feasible fix.

We're all running FM 10.0.1.402 on Win XP Pro SP3, 32 bit machines. The amount of RAM varies, but some PCs have 4 Gig. We've all installed the MS hotfix for the text dropout issue. Files are unstructured.

Has anyone else seen anything like this? Any ideas of anything else we can try? Any ideas of a cause??

Many thanks,

Rebecca

PS X-posting this to frameusers list. Apologies to people who're on both.

Report · Nov 09, 2011

Has anyone else seen anything like this?

An FM9 user reported it in 2009, and reported making it go away.

But I suspect you've already seen:
Re: FM9 crash during show/hide of conditional text

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2390892#2390892

* 5 different machines - they all see the issue.

All XP32 Pro SP3?

_______

I don't have FM10, and only use FM9 for testing.

We're an FM7.1 (and FM6) Unix shop.

I've seen lots of crashes, but never related to Conditions.

Report · Nov 09, 2011

Rebecca,

The references to memory that could not be read or written can also be a harbinger to hardware issues, though if it's happening on several machines concurrently, it's less likely. I've also had some crashes when playing around with conditional expressions in FM10, so odds are there's a bug lurking in there. At this point, all I can say is that ctrl-s is your friend. Whenever you're going to change things with the conditionals, make it a reflex action. Annoying yes, but hopefully minimizing any loss.

Report · Jun 26, 2012

A solution is below but you might want to read the details first to see if your problem is similar.

I've been using FM10 daily, adding and changing conditional text without problems until Friday when I had the crash problem in one file of a book that had ten files. Unlike Rebecca, FM didn't crashed when I APPLIED the conditional text but sooner -- as soon as I clicked on the "Conditional" and "In" buttons, before clicking on the "Apply" button. I would not see an error code, even when waiting 10 minutes after the program froze. All other files in the book did not crash when I used conditional text. It may not be coincidental that the crashing file was by far the largest and most complex file in the book, although the Conditional Text Settings had been imported into all of the book files.

After the first crash, this one file crashed 100% of the time. I tried all of the same solutions that Rebecca tried but they didn't solve the problem. I tried to make the conditional text cause a crash in other books of various dates. None crashed -- except my backups of this particular file -- even ones months old that had not had a problem previously. This didn't make any sense to me, so I gave up and consulted our IT guy, who suggested the following:

SOLUTION THAT WORKED FOR ME

If you upgraded from FM9 to FM10, you may still have FM9 and not know it. Look for in your Programs folder.

1. Open the problem file with FM10.

2. Save as FM9.(There is a warning that you may lose some features.)

3. Open the FM9 file with FM9. Try applying conditional text. It was fine -- no more 100% crash for my file.

4. Close FM9 file.

4. Open FM9 with FM10.

5. Save as FM10.

6. Six hours of work on this file, with several dozen applications of conditional text -- no crashes!

My IT guy advised me to report his bug. I have no idea why his solution worked, particularly after reading that some people had this conditional text crash problem with FM9. However, at least for this one file,, the crash problem seems to be resolved.

Report · Jun 26, 2012

Hi Sylvia

Thanks, that's an interesting piece to add to the puzzle.

We haven't had problems since we cleaned up the sick files by eliminating multi-page tables with conditioned rows, and removing conditional text from the first page of each file.

Adobe eventually determined that it is a bug and raised a bug ticket, #3084984. Hopefully it'll be fixed in the next release. If you report the bug, might be worth mentioning that symptoms are similar to #3084984.

Report · Nov 09, 2011

Hi Error and Arnis

> All XP32 Pro SP3?

Yes. Hardware's quite different - 2 are laptops - but OS and general settings are the same.

We had seen the thread http://forums.adobe.com/message/2390892#2390892

The guy who posted a solution had been seeing crashes when creating PDFs and got rid of them by a stubborn cleanout and reinstall of Acrobat. The OP didn't come back to the thread. People suggested changes to his build expressions, but they don't apply in our case because we've got overlapping conditions.

About the possibility of hardware issues: 3 of the 5 machines have had problems lately (2x graphics card, 1x memory) but we've solved those and the problem's still there. The 2 laptops see the problem too, and they've had no hardware issues.

Someone on Framers suggested recreating the file from a blank. I've just done that and still saw the problem. (Opened new file, imported all settings from template, pasted in content of sick file). It still crashed. I even went back to an old template from before we started using build expressions, and manually recreated the build expressions. no luck.

I've packaged up the files and crash logs and sent them to Adobe.

Thanks for your thoughts!

11 Nov: An engineer who follows Framers has been in touch - great!

Report · Nov 09, 2011

By the way, we're speculating it's FM's pagination engine getting upset with CT causing repeated major changes to pagination. But that's pure speculation!

Report · Nov 09, 2011

We've found workarounds (yay). Basically, it looks like the files were too complex for FM's liking. Two things to avoid:

1. multi-page tables with conditioned rows

2. a large amount of conditional text on the first page of a file, immediately following an imported TOC inset.

That second thing could've been because hiding the conditional text removed page 2 of the doc, or it could've been just because the conditioned text immediately followed the TOC. We couldn't tell.

We've got plenty of files that have both these things and don't crash, so they're not a guarantee of disaster. But changing one or both of them stops our sick files crashing.