Help a neophyte with broken images?

[Badhbh]

I'm trying to help the nice, stressed out lady that runs our company's Knowledge Base. It's RoboHelp 5.0.2. I don't personally work on it, but every morning I come in and she's in tears at her desk because the images are broken again. None of us are terribly savvy with it. Out IT department's suggestion was to go in and rename them, but they only break the next day. So every morning, she comes in and fixes the images. Every. Morning. She's losing it.

What I know: images are stored in their own folders for each section. Any change to the file name will make them show up again. They break every 2-7 days. They aren't all stored in the same folder. Both .jpg and .gif break- there's no difference. She's tried different naming methods (i.e. image001.jpg vs nuritmenu.jpg), and that doesn't seem to be helping either. She has deleted the pages, and reimported them, and they're still breaking. It's consistently the sames images breaking. Some are fine and never break. I don't know what else you may need to try to nail it down. I'm taking a screen shot of the main page just to show how all the files and folders are set up, but I have no idea how much good that may do you. Any help is welcome, as she's about to have a meltdown and nobody knows how to help her. Thanks!!

[RoboColum_n_]

Hi Badhbh and welcome to the RH community.

Typically broken images occur when an image is renamed, moved or deleted from somewhere other than inside the RH project. Could this be the case? If so, RH knows nothing about the change and displays the image as broken.

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[Badhbh]

Do you mean renaming in RH vs renaming in explorer for instance? She's currently doing the renaming in RH itself.

[RoboColum_n_]

That's right. If you rename files in Windows Explorer RH won't know about the change. OK so we know that your co-worker is doing things the right way. What I was wondering though was why the images appear broken in the first place. Could somesome else be renaming them in Windows Explorer? How are these images generated? Are they automatically generated somewhere?

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[Peter Grainge]

My guess is that this is a project that has been going sometime, correct? Underpinning RH is an Access database and Access databases sometimes need compacting.That is effectively done here by forcing RH to create a new database.It is not difficult but as you have an older version, it is not as simple as it is in RH7 or 8. See this topic on my site.

http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/opening/opening_projects.htm

Take a copy of the project before doing anything, just in case it goes bang.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

[Badhbh]

It hasn't been up that long really- 4 months? The images started breaking not long after it was put up.

[Badhbh]

I doubt that anyone else is renaming them- there are only 2 people with the access, and she's one. We've been trying to get it fixed since it went up, and all IT says is to rename them, and it's "a known issue". So yeah, that's helpful The images aren't generated really, they're ones that we've collected and put into the RH files.. that's about all I could tell you about it I don't mess with the knowledge base at all, since it makes my head hurt. Linux, I can parse, but this, not so much. heh.

[RoboColum_n_]

Is the project stored on a network drive (bad) or a local drive (good)?

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[MergeThis]

Could you have her select an image within a topic, switch to HTML view, and copy the selected code? Add that to your reply, so we can see it.

Good luck,

Leon

[Guest]

To add to what Colum's said as well as local being "good", it's wise to avoid using folders under "My Documents" it's better to store the help project in a folder directly off the C drive and open from there. Obviously make backups to a network storage area or other secure storage but work locally.

[RoboWizard]

Hi there

If you are open to it, I'll be happy to offer some free consulting to try and resolve the situation. If that sounds remotely interesting, please send me a private E-Mail message to rstone75 (at) kc (dot) rr (dot) com and include the name and phone number where I may call and converse in real time. I'll fire back an E-mail message containing a link that will allow me to see her screen. That way I can observe first hand what is happening.

And if you don't feel comfortable with that, that's cool too. I just felt like making a deposit in the First Universal Bank Of Karma and thought I'd toss out the offer.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML within the day - $24.95! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Badhbh]

Thanks, Rick I've passed that on to her, and I think she's emailing you now

[RoboWizard]

Hi all

I just finished assisting the person with the issue via a remote session. Just an FYI on what we found. The project has about 460 topics. Many (maybye all) of these have been imported from Microsoft Word documents. This results in many different folders ending in _files where the images live.

After opening the "biggest offending" topic, we saw that the folder where the image was being referenced contained an ampersand and it was converting to %26 (I think). She is now working through RoboHelp HTML to ensure some consistency in the folder naming in the project. I'm having her remove all spaces and any odd characters.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML within the day - $24.95! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Badhbh]

Rick, you're awesome If this can help her keep her sanity, i'm all for it. Thank you SO much for helping! She gave high marks to you- you're "really nice, said things that made sense, and knew what you were talking about."