600-page Fm file causes script to fail

[gisteppen]

My script goes through all files in a book to find changebars. It works fine except when it tries to process two very large FrameMaker files, each one being almost 600 pages long. When I try to run one of these large files separately, it fails by not producing any output in the separate changes file into which I am pasting changed sections. There are changebars in the large file but nothing happens.

But if I cut out about 100 pages from the file, then the script works and produces output in the changes file. I have watched the memory usage with Windows Task Manager when I run the full large file and it does not appear to be running out of memory.

Any idea what might be causing this?

Thanks,

Mark

[Russ Ward]

Mark,

Stranger things have happened and it is tough to troubleshoot from here. I'd suggest putting in some kind of debug routine to narrow down exactly where the problem is occurring. For example, in this case I would probably have my script select each paragraph as it walks through the source file, then pop up a confirm() box which aborts the script on No. That way, you can find out exactly where the script gets lost. At first, maybe have it stop every 10 paragraphs or so, since you have such a large file. It's a bit time consuming, but often it's what you have to do in this environment. You might be surprised what you find and it is possible that the file length is a red herring.

Russ

[gisteppen]

Thanks Russ. Good to know an expert view on it if I go back into this script at some point. But I'm out of time on this project and I'm just having the writer split up those two big files.

Mark