This sounds like something you'd get when using structured FM. What flavour and version (pxxx) are you using? ... View more

Try this one: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/403/kb403696.html Colum got a little carried away on his typing ;>) ... View more

You need to do a "Save As" and select Document 8.0 as the version. ... View more

Remember, this isn't really a FM problem - it's all due to Microsoft tightening things up in SP3. I would try out the trial and see if it fixes your problem; if it does, then upgrade. If it doesn't, nothing lost - you're just back to where you started & will end up having to fix things up by hand after all. You really can't expect old software to keep up with new hardware or O/S changes! ... View more

That's the weird thing about Adobe - the patches are sequential, not cumulative. Got to do them in order ;>) ... View more

Hmm, don't know about the referenced images problem (because none of my templates have a referenced graphic - no wait, I lie - there is one that has a corporate Nike-swoosh-like image. Ok, just looked at it - the image is also in an images folder on the same drive as the template - n problem opening it, but it is slow to display). The maker.ini tweak is this: Since there are 2 maker.ini files on a WinXP machine, I edited the one in C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Adobe\FrameMaker\9. There's a section (I think, or maybe I just added it) called Directories In that area I added: TemplateDir=network drive letter:\path to folder containing the templates In my case it reads like this: TemplateDir=P:\Departments\QA Department\Jonas Documentation Conversion Project\doc_projects\Jonas\project ... View more

Hi Tyler, If you are only copying the templates locally to save yourself the hassle of navigating to the network drive location each time you create a "New" document, there is a tweak you can make to your maker.ini file to make it always point to the network location by default instead of your local templates folder. I've done it on my system and it works great. Let me know if that's the case & I'll dredge my memory on what the change is ;>) Jeff ... View more

I'm not sure you can when you do an import - it's a one-shot thing each time. I know that if you link, then you can export & re-import your settings... Jeff ... View more

Hi Eileen, I would highly doubt Adobe would be putting much effort into adding/correcting the RH7 version help anymore since RH8 is their current version... Jeff ;>) ... View more

Yes, that's what I mean - you're ok; they're not, because they're missing the integration provided by the TCS. I remember somebody asking RJ Jacques during his FM to RH webinar if you could do linking with the individual products - "no go," he replied. Importing works fine (although some weird stuff can pop up if your FM docs consist of a book of books). Jeff ... View more

Are the graphics in an anchored graphics frame in FM? If they're not, then RH doesn't bring them in. I had a head-scratcher today around this fact until I remembered reading the RH help file about what gets pulled into RH from FM & what gets ignored. Jeff ... View more

It sounds like your counterpart isn't using the TCS 2.0 - I think that's the only configuration where you get to link FM docs into RH. Jeff ... View more

Yu will find this a powerful feature once you get use to it and explore what it can do to for you without you having the need t constantly try to select art and colors just to make some adjustments and it gives you the opportunity of exploring a lot of possibilities especially when you have a client that is a little difficult because they can not visualize art. They might think they are deriving you crazy but you have this device which makes it easy. ... View more

I think you get that Preview dialog screen even if you publish to a network location - it's the location of the published files in the Properties of the Layout that dictates where the generated help is going to go. I seem to remember that the Generate dialog has the same info as the Properties screen when you go to create the help. Did you use a local c:\ drive for that? Jeff ... View more

Hi Maureen, Have you ever tried publishing to a local drive? That would be the first thing I would try to figure out if it was a server/network thing. Jeff ... View more

Remember that with IE 8 you can click the compatibility mode icon to have a page display better - that might work for you if it shows ok in IE 7. Jeff ... View more

So this behaviour happens if you create a RH8 project and link to a FM8 document/book? But once you open & save the FM8 document/book in FM9, everything behaves itself? Interesting... ... View more

That almost sounds like RH isn't recognizing the copy of FM. Were they installed together using the TCS 2.0 installer? You may want to contact Adobe support for some help on this one. I just did a quick test to see if I was getting the same behaviour, but I couldn't reproduce what you're describing. Jeff ... View more

Hi Norbert, Make sure that you have FM open first - just leave it on the "splash screen"; don't open any books or documents in it. Then start up RH and your project. Then when you link or import a FM book or document, it doesn't have to try and launch FM (which, as you've noticed, can be a bit flakey). Jeff ... View more

Unfortunately, I think Support is a bit baffled on this issue too - I haven't had much luck with them figuring out why my FM9 master book crashes RH8 so consistantly. ... View more

Not only can I get RH8 to fail on the Force Update, I can get it to crash catastrophically in a Windows error! I'm using the TCS 2.0 with FM9 and RH8. I have one master book in FM that consists of 4 .fm docs and 60 sub-books. Each of the sub-books has 4 .fm docs within them. Those docs are fairly empty right now (since we're just starting the authoring process) but are expected to run 50-200 pages each when finished. Even trying to do the initial linking to a project this size is causing issues - RH seems to choke on large FM books. At first I thought it was the network causing issues, so I created local c:\ RH projects to test that (while still continuing to pull the FM content off the network). That didn't work either, so I copied the FM content locally too - still no luck. I contacted Adobe Support and they suggested shortening the FM filenames to remove any spaces and ampersands that I had been using. After doing that I had better luck initially linking the master.book, but RH will still choke when doing an Update when it gets about 50 sub-books into the task. At that point you get the silly "Import session failed. If this error continues please contact Technical Support" with an OK button to continue. Clicking OK still lets the "Processing FrameMaker Document(s)" dialog continue processing, but it racks up immediately on the next .fm doc with the same message. Sometimes RH will just shut itself down after repeated OK's; sometimes it appears that it has completed, but if you do a Save or Save All, a Windows error is thrown, and you are kicked out. Just to experiment, I tried doing an import of the FM files (I know RJ all told us never to do this in his eLearning session, since it defeats the point of the workflow, but a broken workflow doesn't accomplish anything either!) I had better luck importing, but RH threw a message each time it tried to process a FM sub-book, saying something like "Unable to open xxxx.book. Not a valid FM book or FM not installed." This wasn't true at all because I had my copy of FM9 open in the background, and opening the offending book in FM worked fine. There was an OK button to continue and after clicking 60 times, it appeared to have finished. Since this isn't the way we were intending to work, I'm still experimenting with initially chopping out some of the sub-books in FM and then linking it in a new RH project. So far it hasn't crashed, but now my masterTOC and masterIX files aren't being converted into RH TOC and Index files (even though I've told it to do this in the Properties > Content Settings tab of the master.book in the RH Project Manager). I'm going to go back into FM and add more sub-books to see if RH will choke on them when the project is Updated. ... View more

Sounds like a job for a Framescript? ... View more

One thing I've recently discovered is tweaking your maker.ini file so that copy-paste acts like copy-paste-special-text. That's going to save a ton of time copying content from our Word files into FM. You can either change the ClipboardFormatsPriorities= line in either maker.ini to put TEXT at the front of the list. ... View more

Just tried it for the first time using RH 8 generating WebHelp Pro output and Rick's direction for typing overtop of the default Home/Root/Top verbage worked fine. You can even set your own spacer characters if you don't like the ones they default to (our topics already have a ">" sign in them so I chose "=>" to make like little arrows). ... View more

We use Win XP SP3 with RH8 (in the TCS 2.0 suite) around my shop & haven't noticed any effects at all (but we all have admin rights to our own c:\ drives). ... View more

Now this is really weird; I just did an Update > Force Update All on the RH project and all the links are now reporting as fine! I don't know how it fixed itself, but it did... ... View more

Is there any way to have some sort of icon/button/image to act as a placeholder for the .swf so that it plays when clicked by the user in RH? I've got a demo FM file that converts nicely to RH, but when you open up the topic in the .chm, it plays the .swf automatically. Any ideas on how to stop this behaviour? ... View more