Known Participant

Question

RH 2015 crashes when I try to generate a project.

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
May 11, 2016
1 reply
866 views

I recently upgraded four RoboHelp projects from version 11 to RH 2015. The first three converted fine and I generated WebHelp output when finished.

The fourth seemed to upgrade correctly, but when I tried to generate it, RH crashed. Nothing happened. The Output window did not appear and I could not exit RoboHelp. I had to kill it with Task Manager or wait until I got a Windows 7 prompt stating that the application had stopped working.

I have restored the original project several times -- and even successfully generated it in RH 11 -- but I get similar results after upgrading it to RH 2015. During the upgrade attempts, I have gotten a message stating that something was wrong with the .ali file. Since it is not context-sensitive Help, I just tell RH 2015 to re-create it.

From the error message, it looks like:

The event was an APPCRASH.

The application was RoboHTML.exe,

The fault module was mfc100u.dll v10.0.40219.325.

The exception code was c0000005

Any suggestions or answers would be greatly appreciated.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Is your RH2015 all patched up? I’d make sure you’ve loaded all the patches first & then try upgrading a copy of the problem RH11 project. If it upgrades cleanly, save it & restart RH2015 and open up the project to try the generate. I’ve seen sometimes that RH gets all hung up with files in memory or something about upgraded projects if you try to upgrade & generate in one fell swoop. Better to chunk it up a bit – upgrade, then save, restart & generate.

blackankle2Author

Known Participant

Thanks for the reply Jeff. I just checked and I have all of the latest updates installed. I started this yesterday and when I restarted my computer and tried again this morning, I got the same results.

The other three projects seem to be fine, but this one, not so much. The projects are similar and, of course, the most important one is the one that won't generate and hangs RH.

Each project is roughly 500 topics, so they aren't too huge.

Peter Grainge

Community Expert

Thanks Peter. I guess I consider it a software problem because I have worked for software companies for many years. Whenever we release a new version that requires a conversion of prior version files, making the conversion work in all situations is a big priority. Failing that, we would provide a log that told you where the problem was, solve it, and then update our conversion routines. If we couldn't upgrade a customer's files, created in our software, we considered that a bug.

In any case, I guess I have two options, the divide and conquer approach Jeff outlined and another one.

My company has recently been bought by another and the writers who work for our new owners use Madcap Flare. I downloaded a Flare trial version and it appears to have pulled in the RoboHelp project that RoboHelp found offensive just fine. There were a few warnings about index entries, but nothing that hung it up. On initial look, I think the warnings pertain to index entries that refer to topics which have been deleted.

I will review the output Flare generated in greater detail today and also see how it does with the projects RoboHelp was able to upgrade, but so far it looks fine.

It could well be that when Flare rewrites the code, the change is fixing the problem on the fly.

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring information

@petergrainge

Use the menu (bottom right) to mark the Best Answer or Highlight particularly useful replies. Found the answer elsewhere? Share it here.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded