context-sensitive help breaking in RoboHelp 8

[Guest]

Peter - you're a lifesaver and I hope you're out there today . . . or somebody's out there who can help . . .

I shouldn't have said that in my last post about something being the "wackiest" thing I'd ever seen in RoboHelp. Now we have a new problem that's much more serious.

We have an aforementioned (in previous post) enormous RoboHelp 5 project, converted to RoboHelp 8 after much anguish, replacing hundreds of WYSIWYG graphics with true code etc. Map IDs were *not* touched.

Now the context-sensitive help for our VB app is not working, even though the map IDs are still in place on both ends (dev and docs) and all the relevant .hh files were included in my compile. Some topics (within the same help file) appear when called from the app, some don't.

A developer had a theory that in one case the topic ID was assigned (on their end) during design time, the other during run time. He's testing it now.

If it doesn't work, I have no idea where to begin. Is anyone aware of any changes in RoboHelp 8 that would affect the way the .hlp links to VB?

Thank you! - Sandy

[Peter Grainge]

Sorry but RoboHelp for Word and .HLP files are a distant memory and I have no idea what is causing this.

The Map ID is whatever you set when creating the map file, the Map Number is whatever the developer has given you based on what they have put in VB, they have a grid where that number is entered. (Alternatively you give them the number and they insert it in the grid).

Have you done an audit of what is in their grid and what is in your map file?

That's about all I can suggest. Please post back whatever you find.

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@petergrainge

[Guest]

Oh yeah, and in an addendum . . . we just found an image map where you click on a hotspot (specifically, two hotspots out of the four or five on the image) and help crashes. Crashes. Not "this topic does not exist," but "Microsoft Help has encountered an error and needs to close."

*sigh* Any ideas? Is Adobe aware of either of these issues? Thanks.

[RoboColum_n_]

When you compile, does the error wizzard display any errors? Apart from that I'm not sure what to suggest as like Peter I haven't used WinHelp since the last time England had half a chance of winning the World Cup.

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[Guest]

Hi all,

I wanted to thank everyone who responded and post a follow-up to this, as well as a caution.

I felt like the world's biggest ass when I found this out, but it turns out that in my .doc files for this particular .hlp file (our project includes multiple .hlps)  "Automatically Generate Map IDs" was turned on, and of course it should not have been. So the problem was on my end, not the software developers' end.

However - part of the reason it took me so long to figure this out is that I know I never turned that setting on. The other writer on this project has been here longer than I have and never would have turned it on. And it's not like that command is easy to stumble upon and set off accidentally (For those of you who don't know, it's under File>>Project Settings in RoboHelp Explorer). I have to think that RoboHelp defaulted those settings in somehow, maybe during our conversion from 5 to 8.

(Unless someone knows a way that you *can* just stumble on this setting and trigger it accidentally, maybe by inserting some random character in your .hpj . .  . if anyone does, I would love to know about it.)

So, especially if you just changed versions of RoboHelp, I would encourage you to be proactive and, if you don't want "Automatically Generate Map IDs" turned on, double-check and make sure nothing is selected for Automatic Map ID Generation on the "Map Files" tab of the Project Settings dialog. After what happened to me this last time around, I'm probably going to check it every time I compile. - why not add another neurosis to the list?

Thanks again - Sandy