Compiling one .chm file creates another one

Report · Jun 08, 2012

I'm working with a merged help system with approximately 30 sub-projects, and I have to make a change and regenerate the .chm file for all of them. We always generate the .chm file to the !SSL!\Microsoft_HTML_Help folder within the root project folder. I got tired of having to go into each output folder to move all of the .chms to the eventual destination folder, so I though I'd just change the output path to a common folder for all of them.

After generating a couple, I noticed that when I compile some projects, a .chm file from a different project somehow ended up in the output folder. I don't know how it got there because I'd just created the folder and I hadn't generated a .chm for that project yet. Of course I've ended up with some old .chm files overwriting the updated ones that I generated today.

This seems very odd. Has anyone run across this issue?

I'm on RH 9.0.2 with Windows XP SP3.

Report · Jun 10, 2012

Are your merged CHM files located in the project folder? When you merge a CHM file, RoboHelp requires that the CHM file be copied to the project folder. If you do not delete the CHM file, it is copied to the output location for the master CHM. This will overwrite any existing CHM files in the output folder location with the copy in the project folder for the project being compiled.

Delete the CHM files from the folder, and you shouldn't have this problem. I wrote a batch file for my projects to clean out CHM files from the folders prior to batch compiling all the projects. The merge will still occur as the merged files are included in the XPJ and the HHP file.

Report · Aug 22, 2012

Thanks for the reply. This is probably what is causing the issue. I will test when I get a chance.