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byrdye
Known Participant
July 1, 2009
Question

Phantom Broken LInks

  • July 1, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 1521 views

I have a page that persits in claiming it has a broken link. I have managed to isolate it to a link to one particular topic. I can link to any other topic, no problem. I can link to that particular topic from any other page, no problem, it's only on If I link to that one particular topic on that page.  Once I link to that topic (and save) I immediately see a  a broken link in Project Manager - but  the topic line in the Topic References dialog is blank. I have tried deleting and recreating both pages, same result. I've dealt with weirdness in RH before, but this one has me TOTALLY bumfuzzled.

The phantom broken link doesn't seem to do any damage, when I test, the link works just fine, so I can probably safely ignore it, but I'm too much of a perfectionist to do that.

Anyone have any clues?

Thanks!

Jo Byrd

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

RoboColum_n_
RoboColum_n_
Legend
July 1, 2009

Hi Jo and welcome to the RH community.

Does the HTML give you any clue as to what is going on? What happens if you create a link to the topic in another topic and copy/paste it into the problem topic? I hope this doesn't leave your derrière too fuzzled .

Read the RoboColum(n) for mutterings on RoboHelp, Technical Communication Suite and technical communication.

B
byrdyeAuthor
Known Participant
July 1, 2009

Nope! Nice try but no kewpi doll! I did exactly as you suggested. The link didn't appear as broken in the other topic, the moment I pasted it into that topic, there it was again. As I said, I've deleted BOTH pages and recreated them only to have it show up. Every time. This may end up as one of life's little mysteries.

Jo

RoboWizard
RoboWizard
Inspiring
July 13, 2009

I just created a chm file, and the links work just fine...but I managed to unearth a different issue: a style not holding! Since there's a good chance this may end up as a chm file rather than WebHelp, it's dig around some more, I guess.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Jo


Hi there

The fact things work in a CHM file suggests the topics that are causing the broken links are actually one or more folder levels higher than the root level of your project.

For example, your project may reside at C:\Projects\MyProject

But you may have somehow inserted links to topics that sit in C:\Projects

In WebHelp, things would likely break. And in the RoboHelp editor, these links would show as broken. But when you create a CHM file, the compiler will try and resolve links. So as long as the topics you are linking to are found by the compiler, the process includes them.

Methinks you have some detective work yet to do. ANY link beginning with ../ is suspect and worthy of checking. One way you might isolate this easily would be to copy the project, then begin moving all topics to the root from inside RoboHelp. Then perform a find across all topics looking for ../. That should reveal the culprits.

Cheers... Rick

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