RH2020 Will not generate any upgraded RH Classic outputs

[Andrew@xytech]

Hello RHers,

I've been tasked with updating an old version or Robohelp (not sure of the previous version) with RH2020. I can open the project and click through all the topics in the TOC, but when I try to generate Printed Documentation I get a progress bar with the message "Calculating Topics List..." No matter how long I wait, the message does not change.

I got an error message when I tried to generate a PDF that said I needed to install Java. Now that I've installed Java, I get the same behavior for PDF and Printed Documentation.

I have a suspicion that the issue has something to do with version incompatibility. I've tried adjusting most of the output settings with no result. My only idea is to harvest the help topics from the existing project and put them into a new project, but there are many hundreds of help topics.

Any ideas on troubleshooting this issue? Thanks very much.

Andrew

[Peter Grainge]

1. Are the online outputs working?
2. Try a printed output from the About RoboHelp sample project. It's in Documents > My RoboHelp Projects. 

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

[Andrew@xytech]

Hi Peter,

1. They don't appear to be working, the only output I can get is XML.

2. I was able to produce all outputs from the sample project.

Thank you for the response, I've been following your advice for years 🙂

Andrew

[Peter Grainge]

The fact you can generate from About RoboHelp indicates the issue is in your project.

Create a new preset for an online output, that's to avoid any printed output issues. Do not duplicate an old one.

See if that works and post back.

________________________________________________________

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

[Andrew@xytech]

That worked, I was able to produce HTML Help (with errors, but those I can fix). I also tried creating a new printed output preset, but that had the original issue. 

[Peter Grainge]

See if anything here helps. RH2020 Word Output (grainge.org)

If not, it seems to be time for the old divide and conquer approach.

Zip up the project so you have a copy that cannot accidentally be opened and worked on. That gives you a copy that you can safely revert to later if needed. Save the zip file somewhere safe.

In the new UI the output is controlled by what is in the TOC so create two copies of your TOC and delete different halves. One should work and one should fail. 

Assuming one half only failed, create a copy of it and again delete different halves. By repeating that you should narrow things down to the topic(s) giving grief.

If both failed, you need to create smaller and smaller sections.

________________________________________________________

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

[Andrew@xytech]

This is a good tip, it should really help with hunting down my issue. Thanks!

[Amebr]

Another option could be strange code in your stylesheet. You could test this by copying the css file from a sample project and applying it to your topics and trying to generate. As always, have a zip backup of your project in case something goes wrong.

[Andrew@xytech]

Thank you, I'll try this today and see what happens.

[Amebr]

Also, do note everything will look wrong in your topics, we're just testing if there is something strange in your css. (You might already realise this but sometimes people panic 🙂  )