Home page not displayed properly - frameless output

[amie68]

The home page for one of our help files is displaying as pictured below after generating today. Essentially the topic page headers, navigation, etc. are displayed in addition to the home page buttons/content. No links are active, cursor does not change to hand icon when hovering over content.

If I open any other topic page from the generated output, the page is displayed correctly, and all links work. It is only index.htm that seems to be impacted.

I am using RH 2022.4.179, frameless output, filters for versions by audience.

Since this was published with the last sprint release for this product (approximately 3 weeks ago) we made changes to remove a duplicate style sheet and remove an unused style sheet - applying that change to 100+ files, made some heading style changes on a few topics, deleted about 50 unusued graphic files, and made a few minor content changes. I have looked through source control log files and see no logged changes to any system or template files.

Any ideas? 

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Is it behaving locally?

[amie68]

No, it's not.

If I deselect use template home page, I get a usable help file that works as it should - minus the look of the home page with tiles of course. So - def related to whatever process builds that home page.

[amie68]

I'll add that I've tried pulling in a clean copy of our template and overwriting what is in that help file. Didn't change the result.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

"pulling in a clean copy of our template " - inside RH and generating again or in the output?

[amie68]

Importing into RH and then generating again

[Peter Grainge]

I'll add that I've tried pulling in a clean copy of our template

Do you mean by that that you have created a new template or an older copy from source control or suchlike?

Sorry to ask the obvious but did you select the name of the new template in the preset.

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[amie68]

• Deleted the current template from the file with the issue.
• Exported the template from a help file that is working properly.
• Imported that template into the file that is having the issue.
• Selected the newly imported template in my output preset.
• Generated and saw same negative results.

[Peter Grainge]

Updated Reply

The forum did not email your steps so I hadn't seen your reply.

With problems like this it would have been worth starting by trying a fresh copy to confirm or rule out the issue is with the template. Having found in this case it was template corruption, then working back through old versions if you can will hopefully find one that is good enough.

________________________________________________________

My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[amie68]

Also did a other few things in addtion to what I've listed above before reverting back to an old version:

• Used a brand new out-of-the box Adobe template rather than our customized version.
• Deleted all local files and got a fresh version from source control.
• Had a team member generate from their PC to rule out local system issues.

I can be fairly stubborn in figuring out things like this, so admitting defeat wasn't easy 🙂

[amie68]

To close this out for anyone who may refer to it in the future...

I was not able to correct this issue. In the interest of best using time and resources, I moved from correcting the issue to recovery. Rolled back to the last version that worked correctly and then methodically re-applying changes that had been rolled back. I did frequent checks after chunks of changes were reapplied, confirming that I could still generate correctly. All changes are now back in, and I have no issues with the file. I'd rather have a definite answer as to what made this happen, but am beyond grateful for the diligent use of source control that made this an irritation rather than a crisis. So the moral of this story is - sometimes weird things happen. Be sure to use backups and source control 🙂