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M
MeghanS17
Participating Frequently
March 25, 2019
Question

Search results show duplicate topics (and 1/2 don't work)

  • March 25, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 1357 views

Hello,

I am using RoboHelp 2017 on Windows 10. I have a project that I have been working on for several months, although I am not that familiar with RoboHelp other than this.

I generate Microsoft HTML output and recently ran into an issue: for reasons I don't understand, whenever I search for a topic in the generated output, it lists many of the resulting topics twice. Clicking one of the topics out of the pair brings up the topic as expected. Clicking the other topic listed always brings up a "This page can't be displayed" message. Sometimes the first topic listed doesn't work, sometimes it's the second. Here's a screen capture that hopefully displays the problem clearly:

Please let me know if there are any more details I can provide. I am really not sure what happened.

Thanks very much.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Jeff_Coatsworth
Community Expert
Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 25, 2019

All up to date on your RH2017 patches? Where are you trying to view this CHM - local drive or server?

M
MeghanS17Author
Participating Frequently
March 25, 2019

Hi, thanks for your reply. To be honest, I am not sure how to tell whether or not I am up to date on 2017 patches. I think I was prompted to install a patch several months ago and did then. When I click File > Help I see that I have RoboHelp 2017 Version: 13.0.2.334. Please let me know if there is another place I should be checking.

I am viewing the output on a local drive.

M
MeghanS17Author
Participating Frequently
March 26, 2019

I think that's got the second update applied (can't tell for sure because I don't have a copy of RH2017 kicking about to look at). Was this working before? Does it misbehave if you try generating WebHelp or Responsive HTML5 output? (just as a test)


Jeff, yes, the search was working properly before. But your question led me to do some investigating in my backup files about exactly when the issue occurred, and it seems to be linked to another problem I had a couple of weeks ago:

At the beginning of the month, I imported a folder with several .HTML topics into my project. After I did that, any time I tried to compile the project and generate the .CHM output, RoboHelp would crash. Searching through the forums and Peter Grainge's site, I found out how to fix it. Apparently sometimes when you do an import something goes wrong with one of the files. I had to find the problem .HTML file and delete it, which I was eventually able to do.  After this RoboHelp no longer crashed during output generation and I was able to create the .CHM file.

I thought everything was fine, but searching through my backups it appears it was at this time that the search started displaying results twice for many topics. So I thought perhaps this meant that I had imported topics twice accidentally. But many of the topics that are displaying twice are not files that I imported at all.

To answer your second question, I was not able to successfully generate WebHelp or Responsive HTML help at all. I am still working on figuring out what might be the problem there. I have never generated those outputs before, so maybe this is a user error.

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