A better way to deal with lost hyperlinks when converting Robohelp to Printed doc?

I have a very large print document compiling in RH 7. Same RH project. It has been going for 2 hours. It could take awhile longer.

Meanwhile,
Kat,

Are you starting each topic on a new page? If not, have you tried creating the print doc with each topic starting on a new page?

Harvey

Peter,

I probably didn't say it clearly.

My tests are all in RH 6. I never got around to testing a huge print doc in RH 7, because I haven't needed it.
Will try it in RH 7 when I have some time.

The .dot template fix was for RH X5.x, which I do not have on my PC. I put it into RH 6, but it had no effect on this problem.

Tidbit, FWIW: My project is 98% tables, but none have any merged cells, I'm certain.

Kat,

Word 2000 is history here. They're getting ready to deploy Office 2007, and I've told my desktop support person Word 2003 must be reinstalled. I'll have both 2003 and 2007 until Adobe makes the upgrade.

H

You said that this problem does not occur in RH6. On that basis I doubt they will fix a bug in an old version.

Peter,

The tech note says this fix is for RH X5.xx only.
But I tried it anyway with RH 6. It made no difference.

The key templates for RoboHTML are PrintDoc.dot and Style Mapping.dot.

The latter has no embedded macros, and appears to be unchanged since 9/21/2002.

PrintDoc.dot was updated in March 2005 for the RH X5 fix. It has several macros.
For RH6, the template macros viewer shows a new one was added to update image hyperlinks.

I can't read most of the gobbledygook with a text editor, of course, but my file comparison tool found a lot of changes from 2005 to RH6 in December 2006.
I substituted a fresh copy from the RH X5 fix download for the one installed with RH6. The so-called malformed topic popped up in the same place.

The "malformed topic" apparently is not a project topic. As I watched the output directory, I saw two files building. There is a temp file with a .doc extension that builds for awhile, and RH appends its contents into the intended print output doc. The temp file is deleted, and a new one starts building.

In my test, the output doc gets to about 25 MB when the error occurs. I think it is one of the temp files that gets "malformed."

That's why the message says,

The Word Document became corrupt when attempting to append a malformed topic: 'topicfilename.htm'

It processed 1,300 or so topics before the error. I let it run through the remainder, another 8,000 or so topics, each generating the error. It got to the end, reported that some chapters were not generated, cleaned up the temp files and left behind a Word doc containing the 1,300 topics in 800+ pages. But no TOC and no images

All of this took about half an hour, while I was getting some real work done.

Let's hope RH 7 doesn't have this illness.

Harvey

A footnote: Before my time, this project was compiled every couple of years manually into more than a dozen subdocuments merged into a Word master document. It was unwieldy, and you couldn't find any small details because there was no Index, just a table of contents.

That's why we switched to an app that generates HTML files from massive databases, with a hyperlink from every significant term to its parent topic, and fed it into RH to get a coherent directory structure, TOC and Search function.

So why am I trying to generate a printed doc now? Because I can't do it, I guess.

Interesting thought from wgmeisheid. I think the template being used is the same one in all cases. Follow the link below and you will find templates for different versions of Word. Could be worth a try.

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=4cf80b20&sliceId=1

I do not think the problem is Word 2003 itself, but the RH template for 2003. It sounds like the macro process in the template is running out of memory, which can happen when there is not a proper memory refresh in really long processes, which I have run into with my own complex macros. That is why you can do half and half but not the whole document.

Since the template is locked, it can only be fixed by Adobe.

I don't think any Microsoft or Word specialist forum will help as this issue is simply to do with the conversion from RH to Word, an aspect foreign to those forums. There are some people who only follow HATT on Yahoo Groups so you could try there.

Kat,

Looking back over this thread, I was reminded you're using RH X5. I'm using RH 6, so all I can do is guess based on my experience with X5. Sorry.

Here's a flash of an idea:

Do you have the MS Word Autosave feature turned on, as I do? Does the print generator run for approximately the same number of minutes? Monday I'll try turning it off in Word before starting a new print doc.

Interesting that your output works OK with each half, but not the whole project. Makes you wonder about the "malformed topic" message, which I am also getting. And maybe they finish before reaching the Autosave trigger.

It could be a spurious message, meaning that something happened that made the print generator "think" it was malformed. We both have been able to get past the supposedly malformed topics by changing the size of the output.

In my case, I removed a buch of TOC topics, even a whole book or two, near the top of the TOC (print version, not WebHelp TOC). So the topics were still present, but not included in the output. RH 6 breezed right past the point where it had stopped on two previous runs, only to crash again, after about the same amount of time.

Have you tried reducing the size of the output by omitting topics ahead of the crash point?

Factors that make no difference in RH 6:
--Using the style mapping .dot, or letting RH pick up styles from the topics.
--Preserving hyperlinks or not. (Without hyperlinks, I got more pages, but it broke at about 25 MB in the Word doc, which has been fairly consistent.)

Good luck.

Harvey

Kat,

I'd say memory usage is not the problem.

Can you put your finger on just how much was accomplished before the crash? Is it consistent from one crash to the next? Is it during pagination? Are you including a TOC, Glossary or Index?

Another process to watch is in the !SSL! folder where the Word doc is building.

Normally, in Windows Explorer while RH is running, you should see a printname.doc and a temp folder. Open the temp folder and you should see the directory of project folders, each containing its topic list. You'll also see a bunch of project source files.

A number of temp chapter files appear, named $HtmlDoc_Chapter_abcdefsoiuy.htm,
where abcdefsoiuy is a folder or file at the root directory level.

A printname.trs file contains a running list of processed topics.

The temp folder stays as long as the RH completion dialog remains on the screen, until you click "View Result" or "Done." Then Poof! the temp file is gone. (Maybe this is why it's called the !SSL! folder?)

Right-click and open the .trs file with Notepad or similar text editor. Scroll to the end. What's there?
I was able to open the file before the process completed, but RH output failed at that, which is to be expected. So wait until the end.

On the other hand, when it failed, the printname.doc was just under 25 MB. So maybe that's the limit in Word 2003? Maybe this version of word stuffs the file with a lot of MS Office code that bloats the output? How big is the successful output on the other machine?

Harvey

I agree. I'd go for system or application software problems. However, a lot of programs get tangled up in unexpected "memory leaks" that have a solution in their source code.

It doesn't cost anything to turn on the Task Manager.

Harvey