Robohelp 2020 - Stuck At Indexing references

[ChipM]

So I have read through replies here and tried some things (mostly new small TOC) to no avail. I am attempting to generate Microsoft HTML Help and it sits at Indexing references for 30+ minutes. I am at a loss and of course under a deadline to get this Help system compiled for a major release. I am exporting to the following Output Path...C:\_Help_Output.

FYI...I have also attempted to output to Responsive HTML5 and it too gets stuck but when I finally give up and shutdown Robohelp the HTML5 Help appears to be generated and navigable.

FYI #2...I had the same problem in 2019.14 and hoped moving to 2020 might fix it by some miracle but alas...

[Peter Grainge]

This is a troublesome project but after a couple of hours I have some idea of where the problems are.

Follow these steps.

1. Create a brand new project. Do not be tempted to reuse an existing project.
2. Rename the default.css file to default01.css or something so that no default.css is found in the next steps.
3. In the Contents panel right click and select Import Folder.
4. Navigate to your main project and import only the Introduction folders.
5. In the TOC drag that folder to the TOC.
6. Set up the responsive preset and use your usual default topic.
7. Generate and it should work. 
8. Repeat steps 4 to 7 for each folder.
   Do not import more than one folder at a time.
   Do not import the Part Level folder.
   Generate after each import.
9. You should find you can still generate. The styles will be wrong and there will be no images but it will generate.
10. Create a copy of the project as it is now and zip it. You will likely need to come back to this stage of the rebuild.

Now at this point no topic has a CSS applied as they are pointing to default.css and in Step 2 we made sure that doesn't exist.

What I have tried is then:-

1. Adding the Part Level folder. Project no longer generates.
2. Adding back default.css and your other CSS files. Project no longer generates.
3. Ading back the images in the assets folder. Project no longer generates.

Now it might be that adding those things back in a different order will establish which one is the problem. It could of course be any one, any two or all three. The important thing is without those it generated in a new project.

Whilst you said responsive did generate notwithstanding the message, I got to that point but found search did not work. Maybe other things too.

I will look some more when I can but hopefully that will help get you back a working project.

[ChipM]

Thanks so much for all your help so far. I'll give this a try and see what I come up with.