RH9 crashes when generating content

[Guest]

After suddenly experiencing this problem with other projects I've developed, I decided a test case was in order. I created a new WebHelp project. Then I duplicated the initial topic a few times. Then I started to generate and publish, scanning down through the settings, but leaving them unchanged. Then I clicked Save & Generate. The project-generation animation ran for a few seconds and the blue progress-bar seemed to fill up entirely. Then RH vanishes. It shuts down without any message about problems. It starts back up again without any complaints. But when I click View Primary Layout, a dialog box explains, "WebHelp output is not generated yet. Would you like to generate it?" Clicking 'yes' starts the loop all over again.

Suspects:

- We've recently had our IT group roll out some increasingly severe security measures. Is there a possibility that is obstructing the process?

- My laptop has been having problems executing Javascripts (might be linked to the first suspect). Is this a possible source of the problem?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Sounds like security - check to see that you have full rights to your \!SSL!\ folder - ideally it would be located in your c:\projects\{project_name}\!SSL!\{output_type}\ folders

[Guest]

Thanks for the quick response.

I checked the Properties of the folder. It's located at C:\Documents

and Settings\ScotAHanson\Desktop\TEST\test\!SSL! for this test project.

It shows that I've got Allow on 6 out of 7 security permissions (the 7th is

Special Permissions, which the Admin account doesn't have either). The

Advanced view shows me with Allow on 14 of 14 items.

Is there any way to view a log of the generate process and see exactly

where things are getting derailed?

Scot Hanson

QA / Technical Writer

R7 PBS Apps Team

ISS

--- a message from the cloud ---

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

One way to confirm if it's an issue with needing elevated rights is to have one of your IT peeps log into your machine with their elevated "God" status and try to generate. If it works fine for them and not for you...

There's your answer!

Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Guest]

That's a great troubleshooting idea. On Monday, I'll try to find someone to

test this. Thanks!

Scot Hanson

QA / Technical Writer

R7 PBS Apps Team

ISS

--- a message from the cloud ---

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

FYI - just because the default location for projects is in that long convoluted path to My RoboHelp Projects - best practices dictate using c:\projects\[individual_project_names]\ as a structure. Shorter is always better in the RH world ;>)

[namedujour]

This is probably not the reason in this instance - especially with the security you say you have now, and the way you duplicated the same file over and over - but whenever Robohelp crashes on me I can usually locate a file somewhere that has a bad character in the file name, like #, %, @ etc. Robohelp doesn't like file names (or folders in the file path) with spaces, and it doesn't like file names with odd characters. I always begin with those two things.

So this is probably for someone else. For that someone, the solution is to just add an underscore in place of spaces, or change the file name to remove the character. Voila.

There was an incident a few months back when I created an interactive calendar from one of Microsoft's templates (the kind that automatically changes the days when you change the year) and saved it to a PDF, which I uploaded as a baggage file. Things got all messed up, and I couldn't generate until I removed that file. So there could be something within a random PDF somewhere that Robohelp doesn't like, like that interactive code in the original template I used.

What I do when this happens is create a new project and import the HTML files from the old project one group at a time until things crash. Pull in half the files and generate, then delete them and pull in the other half of the files and generate. If one half crashes the program, you know where the file is. Cut those files in half and half again until you locate the file. Do the same thing with all of your baggage files.

If you never crash the new project with the old files, just replace the old project with the new one. Maybe something buried deep within the original project got corrupt, so it's more efficient to just begin anew, rather than keep looking.