RH7 to RH8 build issue

Report · Jan 12, 2010

I'm working with some Russian colleagues on transitioning several hundred RH7 files to RH8 and we've uncovered a problem with the new builds:

The point is that during the build a certain warning appears in the log.
I investigated this issue and found out that it started happening after RH7 > RH8 transition.

In RH7 the first line in the file was:
<!doctype HTML public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Frameset//EN">

In RH8 it is:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

As far as I understand, the question mark is what confuses the building system

Do you have any idea how to fix this in an effective way? I would be time consuming to edit every single file

Does anyone know how to fix this? Is there a script we can run to excise he "?"s or change the line?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Craig Della Penna

Report · Jan 12, 2010

Hi Craig.

This "warning" is from your application? What does it say? As far as the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> tag is concerned this is integral to all RH8 topics. RH8 moved to using XHTML hence the different tag. Change this at your own risk but I wouldn't if you want things inside the help file to work correctly. If the question mark really is causing your build process to choke, you'll have to change the build process.

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Report · Jan 12, 2010

Thanks Colum, I thought that might be the case about the XML file, I'll see what the Russian team says about the build process, they're using Perforce so they may be able to make changes in the system...

I'll get back once I have more info.

Craig

Report · Jan 12, 2010

The warning says:

XXX3004: Warning: xxx.htm : The HTML tag "?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?" is not a valid HTML tag (it does not begin with an alphanumeric character).

Apparently the build objects to the first "?", this happens with every file and because of this the overall build 'fails' we have to override and mark it as 'Passed' but this is on its way to becoming a major problem. Would the folks at Adobe have insight on this?

Report · Jan 14, 2010

It sounds like the log is one your developers use and it needs amending for RH8. As Colum said, that line is in all topics.

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Report · Jun 01, 2010

Hi, I thought I would share this in case someone else comes to this thread searching for a solution to this error message:

The HTML tag "?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?" is not a valid HTML tag (it does not begin with an alphanumeric character).

After upgrading my project from RH7 to RH8 (and doing some other things), when I compiled CHM I got the above error message (among others) on each and every topic. I was very confused about this, because many of the topics were absolutely identical in every way with topics in another RH8 project (I compared them using Beyond Compare, among other tools) which was not giving any error messages at compile time.

This is what I did to solve the problem:

Close the project.
Delete the CPD file.
Reopen the project. I got a message that one of the topics was outside the scope of the project and would not be displayed in RH Explorer. So I re-imported that topic (which actually had been successfully imported before, but okay, whatever....)
Fixed a broken link that I found due to another "missing" topic.
Recompiled. No more error messages!

So, at least in my case, this error message was caused by some sort of corruption which, fortunately, was easy to fix by reimporting a topic or two.

Hope this helps someone.

Adobe Community

RH7 to RH8 build issue