broken help images

[epsobolik]

I have had a recurring problem with RoboHelp for Word 6. Whenever I have to work on a help project that I havent' looked at in a while, I make my edits and then try to compile (to Web help). I will get a silent compile failure - the status window says 'Starting compilation...' and the window title says 'WebHelp has been generated'. No help files are generated. I have learned from experience (and possibly from this forum) that what this means is that a help image 'object' has become corrupt and ends up as a Word image rather than a RH help image. I have to go through each module (all 28 of them) and switch from Dynamic WYSIWYG to TrueCode. I started to save the files in TrueCode mode, so that means I have to convert to WYSIWYG and then convert again to TrueCode. Then I have to search (visually) for any images that didn't get converted, delete the image, and re-insert it the RH way. I have noticed that It is usually one particular image btnChoices.bmp - just an image of a small button with 3 periods (to simulate an ellipsis - we use it to show a list of choices that can be entered into a field). So, a 15 edit ends up taking a day or so trying to get it to compile.

Well it finally happened - I have a file that doesn't get fixed when I do that. I have it down to:
1. delete the image
2. re-insert the image
3. convert to WYSIWYG
4. convert to TrueType
5. The conversion fails on the image I just added

I tried re-capturing the image and giving it a different name - no luck.

Has any one else had this problem? Did Adobe correct it in version 7?

Phil

[epsobolik · Accepted solution]

Updating to RoboHelp 7 didn't help.

I ended up making a new project and importing all the .doc files into it. I found one place that had a compiler tag that didn't make sense. I removed the tag. Anyway I got it to work - still don't know for sure what was wrong. A better message would sure help - or a log file to see how far it got.

Phil