A

Anonymous

Question

File Update Crashes Robohelp

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
March 31, 2009
4 replies
6082 views

This is a persistent problem that I've had from Day One of using this product. And yes, I have all updates installed.

I am able to create the RH project and copy by reference the FM book, and generate webhelp alright, but occasionally and for no apparent reason, when I update a single file (chapter) in RH, the update goes to an unspecified point and crashes the program. Every subsequent update of that file results in the same crash. Now I am afraid to update the entire book for fear of corrupting the entire project. When I re-open the RH project following the crash, all the cross-reference markers in the updated file appear in RH as red boxes. Does this indicate a problem with a specific cross-reference in the FM source file?

Any help would be greatly appreciated as the amount of manual post-synchronization work in the converted RH files is significant (due to Chinese translation). By the way, other larger FM files in the same project updated successfully (and were also subject to the same Chinese translation process), so I'm at a loss as to the cause of this problem. It must be in the specific FM source file somewhere.

FrameMaker integration

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A

Anonymous

I had this same problem with RoboHelp 8. I updated some of my linked Word files, but they didn't update in RoboHelp (they should have shown up red, so I would know to update them). I went ahead and updated the files so I could get the HTML files. Well, this caused a crash and when I tried to open RoboHelp again, I got the RPJ error message. RoboHelp opened, but the linked files were gone. I still had the HTML files, but that wasn't going to help much because my client needs seamless updates as they change their documents.

So, I read here how one user's data center re-build the APJ file. I copied the APJ file to my desktop and opened it with Wordpad to check the HTML - especially at the end, where I found two instances of </genfile > that didn't match up to <genfile>. (I did go through the whole document to be sure I wasn't missing anything). I deleted them, copied the file back to my RoboHelp directory and opened RoboHelp without any problems. The linked files are there and everything seems back to normal.

I hope this helps you.

I

isologica

Participating Frequently

Fab - thanks for the tips.

I have managed to tip-toe around these issues (more gingerluy than I care to) and hope that TCS3 with new FM/RH integration is going to solve these issues

Regards,

Bastian

A

Anonymous

Same here. Using RH 8, first force update of FM book converted to version 9 crashes the app cold; subsequent attempts have the same result.

Deleting the .cpd does not appear to make any difference.

Any workarounds?

A

Anonymous

I am having exactly the same problem as well.

I am thinking it is a memory issue....How much RAM do you have on the computer running TCS?

I have 1.5 MB and I think it may be too little.

I used to have 1.O MB and it crashed more often

now I have 1.5 MB and it crashes less often but the crash does occur only on updating frame files in robohelp.

the process starts and then an error occurs, RH shuts down and that is it

the only solution is rebuilding the project from scratch...

the workaround i have read doesn't work.

any and I mean any ideas would be helpful as I lose 2 days work rebuilding the help project each time it crashes.
thanks!!!

Laura Novich

A

Anonymous

I don't think RAM is a factor; the PC we're using to generate the RH has 2 gigs of RAM, which should be plenty. The crashing is intermittent; fortunately, I have been able to quickly rebuild the project when necessary (the CPD file deletion work around doesn't work for me), so this has not been a supercritical issue, although it is annoying to have to rebuild the project periodically.

I still like this product even with the crashing.

A

Anonymous

I and others have encountered this behavior in RH7; given that Adobe has provided no fix for this behavior, it's been my understanding that this is a feature and not a bug. We've had to create a new project when this has occurred. I'd recommend exporting your mapping settings and backing up your styles (fmstyles.css) in order to make working with this feature more enjoyable in the future. It saves a lot of time in recreating the project.

We just upgraded to RH8, and I'm hoping that this feature has been dropped from the new version.

A

Anonymous

When your RH project becomes corrupted and you can no longer perform an update command, try closing RH and deleting the CPD file instead of recreating your project from scratch. Then restart RH and update the project.

In one case (working locally), I was able to restore my project. In another case (working from a network directory), RH lost its links to the FM files. I don't know if working locally or on the network made a difference in the recovery. Regardless, Adobe needs to fix this issue ASAP!!!!! or are we supposed to spend hundreds of dollars more to upgrade to TCS 2?

A

Anonymous

Thanks for the tip. Next time I run into this, I will try deleting the CPD file. We do all our RH work locally so maybe that will do the trick.

Instead of spending a lot of development on AIR and throwing Photoshop into the product, Adobe really needs to focus on fixing these corruption issues.

Please Adobe, answer this question and/or address this persistent problem.

Once I deleted the CPD file, not only did half of the files in the FM book lose their links in RH (folder icons appeared instead of the Framemaker Integration icons in the Project Manager > Project Files list) but also got an error message about not being able to update the RHFrameDocs.apj file upon re-opening the RH project. Once the project fully opened in RH, updating a single FM file with the latest changes caused the project to crash, and subsequent repetition of the deletion of the CPD file no longer worked. Note that none of the FM source files have been moved or renamed or presented any evidence of corruption or crashing, and there have been ZERO problems generating the book in FM, or the PDF. The only variable in our files is that we are using an english-to-chinese character translation program in FM which does not affect any FM book or file operation, and we have correctly set the language in RH. The translator had to change the name of a couple of topics in the FM source, and these renamed topics were NOT updated in the RH project (in fact, the original files in the Project List had X's next to them, indicating that they didn't exist.

I am going to have to rebuild this project from scratch for the second time, but this is getting beyond ridiculous. I will NOT upgrade just to fix this problem.

Adobe, where the heck are you on this? You have long-time customers getting increasingly angry and considering a move to a different software vendor for a solution.

So my questions are:

Why does the RHFrameDocs.apj not get updated?
Why does the RH project lose its links to the original FM source files?
Why do some of the files (including the book) lose their Framemaker Integration icons in the RH Project Manager and appear as Windows folder icons instead?
Why does the update process continually crash RH?

A

Anonymous

Follow up to my own question, but not necessarily the solution:

Apparently, the source file had some cross-references that pointed to a file that was not in the FM book. I have somebody fixing those now, then we will retest the file update in RH.
Could this cause the file update in RH to crash?

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