Empty/Invisible Topics, Multiple Authors

[heath_huff]

I'm in a situation where I share a project with two other authors. All three of us access the project's directory structure via the office LAN, but I have RoboHelp 7 installed on my machine, whereas the other two authors are less frequent contributors, and they use a Remote Desktop Connection to access RoboHelp 7 installed on a network resource.

I've created dozens of topics and successfully published the project for months. Two of my topics appear empty to the other two authors when they attempt to open them from the network resource. They can see the topics, see their page in the TOC, and double click on them to open them in the work area, but all they see is a blank topic.

Recently, one of the other authors published some updates to other parts of the manual that also somehow blanked the topic in our published product (thankfully internal use only) AND blanked the topic's actual .htm file in the project's directory structure. When I went to open the topic on my local machine, it was gone. I had to go out to a playground layout and rebuild the topic from an older version.

My fellow author still couldn't see the contents of the topic. So yesterday I deleted the topic entirely and created a fresh topic with the same name. She STILL can't see the contents of my brand new topic . . . Any ideas what might cause a topic to appear empty to another author?

We are not using Version Control yet, as we so infrequently work in the same portions of the project. This is a case for version control if I ever saw one. We're retiring this RH7 project in a few months, and I've already got an SVN repository lined up for the replacement project. Still, the question remains. What makes a topic appear empty?

[RoboWizard · Accepted solution]

Hi Heath

The only way RoboHelp HTML works reliably is by keeping the project on your local C drive and working on it from there. You really need to move the project off the network drive. Until you do that, there isn't much help we can (or would be willing to try and) provide to troubleshoot this situation.

Cheers... Rick

[heath_huff]

Thanks, Rick. For our next project this won't be an issue. For our current project, I'll try to get IT to move the project from our networked drive to the resource on which RH7 is installed.