Printed Documentation crashes RH7

[Guest]

I have 3000 screen/page documentation. Help file is OK, but cannot get Printed Documentation to run clean through. Problem started with RH5; still exists with RH7. Printed Documention starts, copies files, Building and Processing first 2 out of 6 parts (though for some reason it skips some topics from TOC). It always skips the same files. In the third part, RH gets into it and then hangs up in same place every time. I monitor the Output View to see what is going on. There are a few format and style Warnings, which i do not believe are significant. Preceding the crash, i get::
"Warning: The Word Document became corupt when attempting to append a malformed topic: 'filename provided.htm' Failed to process 'Topic name provided'... Failed to build 'Word.doc topic title' Fatal Error: Word Document got corrupt. Abort building 'Word.doc topic title'. Failed to build 'This third part title name'. Failed to build 'This third part title name'.
Since RH crashes EVERY time, i cannot get any reports. I only see the end of the Output View. It would be nice to know how to get that dumped to a notebook file. Once i see 'Failed', i know there is no point waiting any longer; RH is crashed and burned.
i have found that i can create segmented Printed Documentation operations that skip the files that are listed as 'malformed'. This is labor intensive and not helping the bottom line.
What makes a topic malformed??
Why is RH crashing?? How can Printed Documentation process be debugged??

[Peter Grainge]

The fact that the topic is not malformed when part of a reduced output suggests the problem is RAM. I have seen exactly what you describe and extra RAM fixed it.

With 3,000 pages, I am not surprised. How much RAM does the PC have?

[Guest]

Let me clarify. When i create reduced outputs, i skip the 'malformed' topics. I just tried to perform Printed Documentation on just the 3rd part of the whole project and RH7 crashed at the exact same point on the same 'malformed' topic. Estimate this part to be <750pgs. At crash doc is 570pgs; 3583KB.
BTW, i have 2 GB RAM on my pc
Sidebar, i tried renaming some topics, via properties, and Printed Documentation process is now stating::
Missing topic 'path and name' Failed to process 'topic name'
This does not crash RH7, but these topics are getting skipped.

[Peter Grainge]

When you renamed the topics, did you update the print layout? Look through it for red "x"s.

Sort that out and then create a copy of your print layout (right click on it).

Now trash half the topics in it and generate that. If that fails, trash half the half. That should be sufficient.

Post back to advise whether that changes things and we can take it from there.

[Guest]

Partial Success!!
I separated project into smaller Printed Documentation pieces and now RH7 and pc will run through each piece without crashing. I can now copy and save the Output Report for analysis.
There are still files identified as 'malformed' which will not process. The Word Doc becomes corrupt and does not build properly. Two of the Printed Documentation pieces generate those same 'Fatal Errors' even though they now complete without a crash. Unfortunately, images are not properly embedded, so the output is not acceptable. Have been analyzing suspect topics and ones preceding to find something unusual but so far have been unsuccessful.

[Peter Grainge]

Further splitting might fix the problem or take a look at Print Issues on my site where there is some information about malformed topics.

Problem is sometime it is a true message, sometimes it reports a topic is malformed when the real problem is something else.

[HKabaker]

You haven't said whether you examined the html source in the malformed topics, or in WebHelp output.

Possible problems:

Special characters in windows format didn't translate properly into UTF-8. Or special characters in html code were transformed into UTF-8, which breaks the html code and may confuse the print generator.

In nested html tags, the order of <span open> and <span close> has gotten shuffled
For example, here are some valid sequences:

<span 1><span 2>Text text text text</span2></span1> text text.

<span 1>Text text<span 2> text text text text</span2>text</span1> text text.

Sometimes nested spans in a file converted from X5 or RH 6 and edited in RH 7 will turn out like this:

<span 1><span 2>Text text text text</span1></span2> text text.

<span 1>Text text<span 2> text text text text</span1>text</span2> text text.

One would think this would affect WebHelp as well as print output. Maybe it did, but since RH didn't crash, you may not have noticed it among the 3,000 or so topics.

You also might check the order of opening and closing < ul> and < ol> and < li> tags in the bad topics.

(I speak from experience about finding non-fatal errors in topics only after publishing the project and browsing it there.)

Hope this helps.

Harvey