Word output troubleshooting

[rlauriston]

TCS 3.5 (RH9), source in FrameMaker, trying to generate Word output, Word 2010, macros enabled. It's a large project, PDF's around 1,000 pages. Generation stalls / hangs about 80% of the way through with no message. Occasionally I get a message from Word that it's trying to recover my document, but that's not when it hangs.

• Same project exports fine to WebHelp.
• Same installation generates Word fine from sample project.
• Tried both .doc and .docx, same results.

I suspect there's an issue in the source, but it's hard to guess where. Is there a log file or something I can look at to see where it's hanging?

[Peter Grainge]

There is the Output View that may help you.

You are saying the PDFs are around 1,000 pages but if you cannot generate printed documentation, how are you getting the PDFs? 1,000 pages in a Word document is stretching it. I would try creating some smaller documents and seeing how that goes.

The quick way is to duplicate the printed documentation layouts and then in the page where the content is defined, just wholesale trash sections of the content.

I'm also curious as to why you need Printed Documentation if you already have the content in FrameMaker.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[rlauriston]

I'm evaluating various alternatives to our current tools, and some of them (e.g. Confluence) can import Word files.

For real printed documentation we generate PDFs with FrameMaker.

[rlauriston]

The Output view doesn't tell me anything. It has a series of Building and Processing messages, concluding with:

Processing 'AppendixI'...

Completed building chapters...

Updating list paragraphs...

And that's it until I cancel the hung build.

[rlauriston · Accepted solution]

I tried again using the "Generate individual documents" option and it completed without errors. Word strikes again.

[Peter Grainge]

Sometimes the Output View will tell you the process is hanging after a particular topic so it can be useful, depends on the cause.

I think the reason Generate Individual Documents is working is because it is breaking the output down into bite size chunks. As I indicated, the size of the document you were creating was large and the process of converting from HTML to Word is very resource hungry. At that level it will kill pretty much any PC. Did you assume the process had hung or did you look at Task Manager. Often a PC will report something is not responding whereas Task Manager will say otherwise.

At some point it might be worth letting the process run overnight.

If single documents suit your needs then all is well but often they are not what people want. You can either recombine those documents or just generate a few documents and then merge those, if you have too many single documents to recombine.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge