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nwhite9327
Participating Frequently
February 28, 2011
Answered

Robohelp 8 Crashes on Generate

  • February 28, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 1158 views

Hello,

I am doing a very large project file that has a lot of .pdf baggage files.  The individual topics are imported .html files.  Currently I am taking a old database (non Robohelp) and putting it into Robohelp 8 (it is up to date).

When I go to compile (locally), Robohelp will attempt to compile and then close immediately.  This happened once before, and I found the cause to be a bunch of broken links, I delete the .html file that was causing it and it would compile.  However, this is very time consuming as I have to keep starting from the beginning, unless I compile/backup every so often.

Is there particular things I could look for to make it not crash?  For example, renaming the .PDF files that have symbols or spaces?  I have no doubt that it is something within the files, I would just like to pin point what causes this.  The pages are mainly just text and links to PDF's (baggage).

Thanks,


Nathan

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Peter Grainge

    Hey Rick,


    Thanks for the welcome .  I noticed a lot of the document names with (& , - _, .), I know for sure it doesnt like % and &.  I guess Im going to have to go slow and just rename all these documents, do a section, compile/backup and keep doing that.

    Nathan

    Edit:


    Here is an example of one of the names of the PDF's:

    Ant,Roach&SpiderKiller2-LABEL-9688-230-FEB06-HG-11-10020-14OZ.pdf


    I realise you are using RoboHelp 8 but this thread may interest you. http://forums.adobe.com/message/3413332#3413332

    Flaven had a problem upgrading to RoboHelp 9 that caused it to crash. The project was looked at by Adobe who identified the cause was PDF files.

    Their troubleshooting was the good old method of copying the project and trashing half of it. If it then worked, the problem was in the half deleted so you repeat the process with that half.

    I know with the number of PDFs you have, that is not what you want to hear but it may be what you need to do.

    See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

    @petergrainge

    1 reply

    A
    Anonymous
    February 28, 2011

    Personally, in a situation like this I would be inclined to somehow engineer out the pdfs altogether maybe converting them to RH topics and generally try and achieve as clean a starting point as possible.

    N
    nwhite9327Author
    Participating Frequently
    February 28, 2011

    Thanks for the suggestion,  I wish I could say that was an option but I am talking about over 3,000 .pdf files.  Honestly, I dont believe it to be the actual PDF files themselves, maybe just the name and/or characters that make up the name of them.  The PDF's are product labels, so its not really a structured PDF document.  I need them as baggage because the users must search information within them such as UPC number and so forth.

    Nathan

    Captiv8r
    Captiv8r
    Legend
    February 28, 2011

    Welcome to our community, Nathan.

    I could easily see odd characters in the file names causing an issue. With RoboHelp HTML, any odd characters in any file name can be suspect.

    For what it's worth, I consider any character other than A-Z, a-z or 0-9 to be considered an odd character. Except for the underscore. The underscore is often used in substitution of a space.

    Cheers... Rick

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