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RH9 hangs on folder operations in big projects

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:52:22 GMT

RoboHelp HTML 9.0.1, trial version. Windows 7 (32 bit), 4GB RAM. Projects local on C: drive.

I've been testing/evaluating RH9, and everything was going uneventfully with the smaller RH8 projects that I upgraded. However, when I brought in our two largest projects, I ran into a serious problem: I was unable to add, rename, or move folders without hanging the application. The status bar just toggled back and forth indefinitely between "Ready" and "Loading topic list" (the topic list was blanked). In each case, when it hung I would trash the cpd file before opening the project again. I also tried removing all PDFs from the project, but that didn't make any difference.

Any thoughts or suggestions, anyone?

Thanks,

SideBySide Error

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:20:56 GMT

I just happened to look at my system event log, and I see a bunch of "SideBySide" errors. They are related to the rhcl command line compile that I'm running from a batch file. The help output appears to be fine, but I'd like to track down what's going on.

Has anyone run into this?

G.

$rhvariable$.htm file in RH8: what is it?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:41:18 GMT

I see a new file in RH8: $rhvariable$.htm. It's a zero-size file, sitting at the root level of the project, and so far I see it in only one project. (This is separate from the rhvariable.apj file, which is present and expected.)

Does anybody know what this file is?

Thx,

Big trouble with FPJ files

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:16:03 GMT

I think this is related to some of the problems that other people are reporting. I'm not sure if starting another thread for this is the right thing to do, but here goes...

I have several writers who have just started to experience files and folders go missing from their RH8 projects. There are two ways that the problem begins to manifest itself: 1.Files/folders are simply missing from RH, and 2.The infamous twitching hourglass that takes a long time to go away. I'll get back to item 2 in a moment.

Here's what I have been able to discover so far:

1. The problem seems to originate with records dropping out of the fpj file. It can be any fpj file, but is (naturally) most noticeable with the root.fpj file.

2. The fact that item 1 has occurred might not be visible right away. One writer worked with the project for two weeks before the subfolders actually disappeared from the Project Manager. When we dug into his backups, we found that his root.fpj file had a problem dating back to mid-October. My theory is that RH was operating (more or less successfully) from the cpd file, until something triggered a cpd update cycle, which in turn made RH notice that the cpd and fpj files were in conflict (thus the twitching hourglass). Just a theory, of course.

3. The problem is not limited to the root.fpj file. It's showing up throughout the projects.

4. Sometimes the missing files/folders are still present in Windows; sometimes not.

5. The earliest fpj dropout we've identified so far is 9/17/2009.

6. It looks like the dropouts are happening on individual fpj files, perhaps as they get touched, rather than something that happens project-wide in one fell swoop. I'm basing this on a single project where there are several instances of fpj dropout, but the dates are different.

BTW, these projects are NOT source controlled.

That's what I have so far. I am telling the writers to back up frequently, and to check their fpj files (at least the root.fpj) to make sure they didn't experience any obvious dropouts. It would be nice if there was an easy way to keeps tabs so that we knew if a problem had occurred. Any ideas, anyone?

Where's the aspirin??!!

standard.js...is this file backward compatible?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 08 May 2009 00:19:05 GMT

I am importing a number of Captivate files into my RoboHelp project. The files were generated using at least two different versions of Captivate. (Maybe more!) It appears that the standard.js file that comes with Captivate-4-generated files is quite different than the earlier one I was used to seeing. (11 KB vs. 1 KB.) When I did a further search in the help projects, I discovered standard.js files of several different sizes (1, 2, 10, and 11 KB).

The newest Captivate files were not compatible with the older standard.js. Can anyone tell me if the newest standard.js is backward compatible? That is, if I use the new Captivate 4 standard.js, will all my older Captivate files run properly? (I hope the answer is "yes," because we group our Captivate files in a single folder with a single standard.js file.)

Also, can you verify that the standard.js file is associated with the Captivate version, rather than being specific to the particular set of Captivate output files? I work on the RoboHelp end, and I don't have Captivate, myself, so I can't look.

Thanks for any insight.

SQL vs. SQL Express

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 31 May 2007 23:44:43 GMT

I am testing RoboSource Control 3 with SQL Express. Does anyone have any thoughts on when it would make sense to use SQL instead?

I'm afraid I don't know what kind of horsepower is needed here.

Thanks,
G

RH7 integration with Captivate

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:03:19 GMT

In another thread, Colum mentioned that "RH7 has a lot more integration with Captivate." We are running RH6, and seem to be up against a limitation on where we can place the Captivate files in the RH project. Because there is a set of several files (.js, .htm., .swf, and skn.swf) for each animation, it appears that we have to carry some of the files as baggage. In turn, that means that the whole set has to live at the root level of the project.

I'd really rather carry these in a subfolder. Will RH7 help me here?

Thx,
G.

Hiding the nav pane at startup

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:09:46 GMT

Duplicate post. See other post with same title under author "Newsgroup User."

The mergedProjects folder

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:58:32 GMT

I'm puzzled. I have a project that has suddenly decided to name the mergedProjects folder "mergedprojects" in the generated output. Since our help lives on a unix server, the change in case is a problem. All of our projects, including this one, have consistently generated the "mergedProjects" folder. Until now, when this particular one has gone rogue. The change happened when I generated output via the command line. Now I get the lowercase "mergedprojects" folder even when I generate from the UI.

Something has changed, but what? The other projects are fine, even though they went through the same process. Knowing that this can occur, we can manually fix the filename, but I'd really rather cure the problem if I can. Any ideas? In the meantime, I am going to grab another copy of the project and see if the problem is some strange anomaly that has perhaps cured itself. How's that for wishful thinking?

G

Thanksgiving Reflections

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 01:52:25 GMT

On this American holiday of Thanksgiving, I'd like to offer my thanks to all of you who have made my life a little easier by sharing your time and expertise here.

My best to you and yours, no matter where your home may be!

Cheers
G

p.s. No disrespect to Canadian Thanksgiving intended. I might have posted this in October, but I was too busy celebrating the holiday with my Canadian friends!

RH under the covers

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:58:06 GMT

We've been looking for ways to improve performance with RH and RSC. As part of the analysis, I used a performance monitor to see what processes occurred while RH was running. Yikes! Even when I am at rest in the project, a seemingly endless parade of file accesses goes flying by. Thousands upon thousands of them. I see this odd looping through files that are associated with the templates, and an ongoing polling of all the folders in the project. Once in a while, it will stop. Certain activities seem to set the whole thing in motion again.

Has anybody looked at this? Is there a way to tame this behavior to achieve better response time? At a casual glance, it looks like RH7 restricts this behavior a little bit. Where RH6 was doing its template-related looping more or less constantly, RH7 was doing it about once a second. That's not enough to tame the beast, though.

Any hints appreciated!

G

Spam

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:30:53 GMT

This might be just a coincidence, but I've noticed that after posting to the forum, I start receiving more spam email. This has happened over several cycles. I'd post and then see an uptick on the spam. Then I'd lay quiet for a while, and it would die down. Posting again would seem to restart the spam cycle.

Has anyone else noticed this?

G

CPD bloat

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:51:50 GMT

We have a large X5 webhelp project (5000+ topics) with a problem: the cpd file bloats up to an unmanageable size just within one day's time. Starting with a clean cpd of about 3-4 MB, rebuilt from scratch in the morning (which takes quite a while!), the cpd quickly grows with each save until by the end of the day it is too big to work properly. It easily grows to 25 MB, and yesterday the writer reported that it went to over 40 MB!

The writer is doing a lot of structural work like adding/deleting/renaming/moving files and folders, so this is probably a worst-case scenario for impacting the cpd. But it's work that needs to be done, so we're stuck for it.

Aside from the obvious solution of breaking the project down into subprojects, is there any other way to deal with this problem? I've just tried to "compact and repair" the cpd file in Access, but haven't had a chance to test and see if that works any differently than simply deleting the cpd file and letting it rebuild. Also, we are moving to RH6; is that likely to help this problem at all?

Thanks for any suggestions...

G

HHP Files

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 02:03:54 GMT

Does anybody know offhand if hhp files should or shouldn't be in RoboSource Control? The project didn't have an hhp until I (just now) generated a chm file, and I'm not sure if I should add the hhp to source control or not.

Thx,
G

Link checker for webhelp output

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:01:09 GMT

Our webhelp has a lot of files (thousands) and a lot of links (even more). If possible, I'd like to automate testing of those links. Does anyone have any recommendations for automated link testing tools? I did see a reference in another post to Xenu, and I liked the price!

Our security policy restricts us from simply downloading any old thing from the internet, so I'd like to find out as much as I can about these tools before spending time on the administrative effort it'll take to try them out.

Thanks for any recommendations (or warnings!).

Cheers,
G

Anybody tried RoboSource Control 3 yet?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 04:04:18 GMT

I just read the description of the new RoboSource Control 3 and am encouraged by what I read. Moving to SQL sounds great.

If anyone has any comments or - especially - experience with RSC 3, I'd sure like to hear about it!

Thx,
G

WinHelp to HTML Help

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 00:27:05 GMT

Another WinHelp/Vista-related query...

We have a PC-based application (as opposed to server-based) that uses WinHelp and What's This help. With Vista coming, it looks like our best bet is to convert to HTML help (chm). If we can simply designate an HTML output for the main help, then that should be relatively straighforward to deal with. What concerns me, though, is the What's This help mapping. I'm having trouble visualizing how to manage that part of the conversion. Does anyone have suggestions or experience with this?

All help appreciated!

Thanks,
G

Old forum topics

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 04:21:06 GMT

Sorry, this has probably been asked a thousand times, but is there a way to view old forum topics? It seems that they go away after a time. I didn't realize that until now.

G

Another "Show Navigation Pane" question

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 01:32:37 GMT

We would like to display the "Show" link at the bottom the topic rather than at the top, where it detracts from the topic title. Is there an easy way to do this?

G

whdata, whgdata, and whxdata output folders

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 22:53:00 GMT

I'm wondering if I can safely remove the whdata and whgdata output folders from my projects. The help runs on our clients' servers, which are IE 5 or better (we don't have to worry about supporting non-IE browsers). We're using the DHTML version of WebHelp--at least I assume that we fall in this category, because we use some DHTML features, and we specify "Java Applet: DHTML>Java Applet>Pure HTML" in our WebHelp SSL. So if I understand correctly, we should need only the whxdata folder to support our help.

Is that correct, or am I missing something? The whgdata folder in particular gets to be quite large. Would there be a danger in my omitting it?

G

"See Also" Tags

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 01:18:57 GMT

I am considering adding a whole bunch of "See Also" index tags to my (large) project. There would be some topics that would end up carrying lots of these tags.

Is there a limit to how many See Also entries that can be attached to a single topic?
Is there a limit to how many See Also entries can be used in a project?

Your thoughts welcome...
G

Project Name Must Not Be Too Short

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:12:10 GMT

It appears that RoboSource Control has issues if the project name plus folder name is too short!

I recently renamed some projects and added them into new RSC DBs. Most projects worked fine (well, as much as they do), but two of them threw Unknown Exception errors when we tried to open the projects from RSC. Had a heck of a time figuring it out .

To make a long story short, this seems to be the rule:

Windows project folder name + RoboHelp project name >= 8 characters

Mostly, the error messages seem to be associated with the projectname.* files. Lengthening either the folder name that the project resides in or the name of the help project itself resolves the problem.

Strange, eh? Since I didn't find this documented anywhere, I thought I'd share.

Cheers ,
G