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A
AIR-Chayah
Inspiring
October 16, 2013
Question

RoboHelp 10: Problems generating Printed Documentation

  • October 16, 2013
  • 1 reply
  • 5385 views

Environment

Windows 7 Enterprise, Service Pack 1, 64-bit operating system

Office Professional Plus 2010 Versions 14.0.7106.5001 (64-bit)

RoboHelp 10: 10.0.0.287

Visual Studio 2010 Professional. I open RoboHelp from within Source Control (have been doing it for two years).

Problem

Sometime after moving to RoboHelp 10, and even after successfully generating Printed Documentation output, I encountered a major problem generating Printed Documentation from RoboHelp: “Internal error encountered. Failed to generated Printed Documentation”. The error occurred when I tried to generate Printed Doc using my default TOC, which looks something like this:

Topic A

Topic B

Book 1

Book 2

Book 3

Topic C

Topic D

Based on an old Peter Grainge reply to someone about a similar problem, I removed all but the first topic from the Chapter Layout pane and generated the Help. Everything was fine until I got to the topics after Book 3. At that point everything started to fail again. When I removed Topics C, D, etc. from the Chapter Layout pane, the output was built successfully.

I tried moving Topics C, D, etc. to the top of the Chapter Layout pane, and got the same error. I tried creating a new folder and put Topics C, D, etc. into that folder. Failure after failure.

As an experiment, I removed all the Topics C, D, etc from the Chapter Layout pane, but then added them to the Print Document Section Layout pane (not where I want them). The Printed Documentation built successfully.

During attempts to build with Topics C, D, etc. in the Chapter Layout pane, I kept getting a Word error: Word is trying to recover your information. After that there was always a failure.

Selecting PDF as the output did not work when the Topic C, D, etc. files were at the bottom of the Chapter Layout pane.

I create a new TOC and a new Printed Documentation SSL. Failed to generate.

As a matter of reference, I've been generating Printed Documentation from the same TOC for more than a year and so cannot figure out what has changed in RoboHelp or Word to cause this grief .

Has anyone experienced anything like this?

Carol

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 16, 2013

Does it work with one of the sample projects?

A
AIR-ChayahAuthor
Inspiring
October 16, 2013

Thanks for your reply, Jeff.

Yes, I created an "online manual", copied several single topics to the bottom of the Chapter Layout pane, and generated PDF and Word successfully.


However, I'm not sure that the test is valid: While I created this sample project locally, I work in my project in Source Control. In addition, the sample project contains significantly fewer files than are in my project.

Two of the quirks in my project are:

  1. I can generate the Word Printed Documentation for my project as long as I don't include the single topics that typically reside at the bottom of the TOC in the Chapter Layout pane.
  2. I can generate the Printed Documentation when I include those single topics from the bottom of the TOC in the Section Layout pane.

For a while I thought that it was because the "Critical error of Source Control Provider. Please restart IDE." message was hiding behind the application and I couldn't get to it fast enough to click OK. When you don't realize the message is hiding out on you, RoboHelp just sits there, waiting, and you end up thinking that it's crashed.

Since I'm also getting the "Microsoft Word is trying to recover your information" message (which I did not get with the sample project), I thought it might be a Word problem, perhaps related to the documentation template that is our default. But that makes no sense considering that I can build the Printed Documentation based on the two quirks above.

Carol

Carol

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 17, 2013

So I'd be tempted to think that not everything you need is checked out of source control when it comes time to create printed documentation. Sorry I can't help you further - I don't use any SC & I never create PDFs out of RH (FM is sooo much better at doing that!)

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