Robohelp 8 Crashes on Generate

[nwhite9327]

Hello,

I am doing a very large project file that has a lot of .pdf baggage files.  The individual topics are imported .html files.  Currently I am taking a old database (non Robohelp) and putting it into Robohelp 8 (it is up to date).

When I go to compile (locally), Robohelp will attempt to compile and then close immediately.  This happened once before, and I found the cause to be a bunch of broken links, I delete the .html file that was causing it and it would compile.  However, this is very time consuming as I have to keep starting from the beginning, unless I compile/backup every so often.

Is there particular things I could look for to make it not crash?  For example, renaming the .PDF files that have symbols or spaces?  I have no doubt that it is something within the files, I would just like to pin point what causes this.  The pages are mainly just text and links to PDF's (baggage).

Thanks,

Nathan

[Guest]

Personally, in a situation like this I would be inclined to somehow engineer out the pdfs altogether maybe converting them to RH topics and generally try and achieve as clean a starting point as possible.

[nwhite9327]

Thanks for the suggestion,  I wish I could say that was an option but I am talking about over 3,000 .pdf files.  Honestly, I dont believe it to be the actual PDF files themselves, maybe just the name and/or characters that make up the name of them.  The PDF's are product labels, so its not really a structured PDF document.  I need them as baggage because the users must search information within them such as UPC number and so forth.

Nathan

[Captiv8r]

Welcome to our community, Nathan.

I could easily see odd characters in the file names causing an issue. With RoboHelp HTML, any odd characters in any file name can be suspect.

For what it's worth, I consider any character other than A-Z, a-z or 0-9 to be considered an odd character. Except for the underscore. The underscore is often used in substitution of a space.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7, 8 or 9 within the day! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[nwhite9327]

Hey Rick,

Thanks for the welcome .  I noticed a lot of the document names with (& , - _, .), I know for sure it doesnt like % and &.  I guess Im going to have to go slow and just rename all these documents, do a section, compile/backup and keep doing that.

Nathan

Edit:

Here is an example of one of the names of the PDF's:

Ant,Roach&SpiderKiller2-LABEL-9688-230-FEB06-HG-11-10020-14OZ.pdf

[Peter Grainge · Accepted solution]

I realise you are using RoboHelp 8 but this thread may interest you. http://forums.adobe.com/message/3413332#3413332

Flaven had a problem upgrading to RoboHelp 9 that caused it to crash. The project was looked at by Adobe who identified the cause was PDF files.

Their troubleshooting was the good old method of copying the project and trashing half of it. If it then worked, the problem was in the half deleted so you repeat the process with that half.

I know with the number of PDFs you have, that is not what you want to hear but it may be what you need to do.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[MergeThis]

64 characters, including the extension? Yikes! And I'll bet that the directory path to that file must be at least as long!

Do yourself a favor, and try reducing these paths as much as possible (and don't use ampersands, spaces, etc.).

Good luck,

Leon