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Does the information here help?
http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/merging_webhelp/merging_method_rh8.htm#mergedchms
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Amber
In my merged help tutorial I state "I still recommend you generate the CHM files to a folder outside of any of the projects; the generate folder, in my example. In the first page of the wizard, make sure you generate the output from all the projects into that one folder or the merge will not work."
From what you say, I think that would avoid the problem. You work with merged CHMs than I do perhaps you could comment.
Saffie
You did look at the tutorial but I wonder if you tried that to see if it fixes the problem.
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I haven't had any problem when generating my chm into a sub-folder of my project, although I don't use the SSL folder layout that is the default now in RH. We generate to a folder just called Output (
), and I pretty much always have an old copy of a couple of child chms in there, just to check some other merging issues we have.
The problem, if I remember correctly, is caused by the copies that RH insists on adding into Baggage Files when you first specify the child chm in the TOC, as it's that baggage file version I found physically compiled into my parent chm.
Admittedly, I haven't tried a project where I've left the Baggage Files as is, and generated to a totally different folder (e.g. c:\temp). I might try to do that in the next few days, to see if the problem is reproducible - this was a problem we dealt with quite a number of years ago, and haven't had to add any new merged chms in for a while.
Oh, speaking of other merging issues, another thing to check is hard-coded paths in the parent .hhp file. This can cause the parent chm to be looking at old child copies in a different directory. We haven't found a solution, just a work-around, which is 1. compile. 2. open hhp and remove paths from the [MERGE FILES] section. 3. recompile. Repeat each time a compile is needed.
Amber
Hi all
Apologies to Amebr if I'm restating what she said. Admittedly I sort of skimmed the thread.
Aside from making things a bit more simple to understand when dealing with the output, there really should be no technical reason you cannot compile CHM files and leave them in the SSL folder locations.
Merged CHM files can be tricksy. Here's the scoop. When you modify the TOC to include the references to the other CHM files, they are copied to your project folder. This means you acquire a snapshot of what they looked like at the time you modified the TOC. To my knowledge, it's a simple copy and the added CHM files aren't added to Baggage. If they were, this would mean they would be stored inside the Master CHM file. That would not only cause an enormous leap in file size, but it would also tend to defeat the purpose of the merging!
For example, perhaps you have Master, Slave One and Slave Two. At the moment you modify the Master project, Slaves One and Two are copied to the Master folder structure. But odds are that if you later modify Slave One or Slave Two, those changes will only be refelected in the SSL folders of those respective projects. They have no way of knowing they are Slaves. You would need to specifically ensure you modified the output folder location so it then points to wherever you want the Master output location to be.
CHM files work differently with merging than WebHelp and FlashHelp do. As a result, you should not expect to find a Merged Projects folder. All you have are the assorted CHM files. Generally speaking, you normally just ensure they all exist inside the same folder so the Master can find the related Slaves.
Cheers... Rick 
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Hello again
Okay, any time you still see old information, it's a pretty sure bet that an old CHM is lurking about and being found. What I would do in your case is to very carefully and methodically scan ALL folders available to you for file names matching the errant CHM files. You may find yourself surprised at what you find!
Cheers... Rick
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I'm still currently on RH6, so I don't know if they've done away with the Baggage Files folder or possibly it's toggled by the view settings for the pod (Project Manager?). NOTE: this folder ONLY appears in RH, not on your hard disk. Any files that appear in this "folder" are actually located in the same folder as the .xpj file.
Find this folder in RH and delete any of the phantom chm files you find, but leave the correct ones for the moment. If you cannot see any of the phantom chm files here, then you may need to manually edit the xpj file in a text editor.
With RH closed, open the parent xpj in notepad. Towards the bottom of the file you'll find a section like this:
<mergedhelpfiles>
<file>
<name>child1.chm</name>
<comments></comments>
</file>
<file>
<name>child2.chm</name>
<comments></comments>
</file>
</mergedhelpfiles>
Delete the highlighted section for every phantom file that should no longer be merged.
Save the file once you've removed all the phantom entries.
I can't remember if you need to delete the cpd to ensure these changes stick. You should be safe to, but if you're hesitant, open the project in RH, re-open the xpj file in notepad and see if the incorrect entries have come back. If they have, repeat the above, but delete the cpd before opening the project.
Hopefully this will solve the phantom [MERGE FILES] entries. It's likely you will still have to deal with hard coded paths for the correct merged chms in which case you'll have to use the workaround I mentioned in my previous post.
Following Rick's suggestion to search all folders you have access to is still a good idea. It should also include the names of the phantom chms you can see in the hhp. If you don't want to delete them, putting them in a folder that isn't in the project directories, and that you're sure has never been part of a project should be fine. Or renaming them in their current locations. e.g. Child1_old.chm or child1.chm.backup.
And feel free to make your edits of the hhp file in a text editor like Notepad as it's just a plain text file, and will avoid any problems HTML Help Workshop crashing.
If none of the above fixes the incorrect content appearing, the final thing to try is deleting the correct chms out of the parent project folder using Windows Explorer, as I mentioned in my first post. Let me know if you want me to go into more detail about that.
Amber
Thank you all so much for taking the time to help I'm still not entirely
sure what it is that caused the problems, but I followed Amber's suggestions to
open the xpj in notepad and delete the merged files, open the hhp in notepad and
delete the merged files, delete the cpd file, and clear the project cache every
time a project is opened.. I also removed all merged projects from my master
project TOC, and started the merge from scratch with all my latest child .chm
files (I didn't generate them to an external folder, just left them in their own
output folder), and it has woked nicely. No more old topics being picked up, no
more random browse sequences! (in fact no browse sequences at all but that is
fine).
It's all a good learning experience despite the frustrations!!
Thanks
Hi,
A bit late answering this one I'm afraid. I've experienced exactly the same problem and worse ir doesn't show up on my machine. Only show up when my chm merged project is copied to other pcs.
Anyway here's what I do about it:
This problem is caused by baggage files being out of date so I have to re-link all sub projects back into the master and then re-generate. When re-linking the software will tell you it's updating the project. All new help where I work now uses web help which doesn't seem to suffer from this problem!
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