Multiple Versions of Robohelp and Problems

[Patrick_McNa]

We are running Robohelp 7 and Robohelp 9 on all of our PCs and having problems with crashes, builds and just strange lockup stuff.  Are there any known issues with running multiple builds of Robohelp on the same machine?  In our case, we have projects that include hundreds of files, and to make a minor edit it doesn't make sense to convert the entire project to Robo9, so we open in 7 and make the change and do the builds. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Captiv8r (Rick) has reported using multiple versions of RH on his machines. The main warning is that Acrobat doesn't play nice when multiple copies are installed on the same machine.

Where are these projects located? Are you using some form of source control?

[Patrick_McNa]

Thanks for the reply Jeff.  All of our project files are located on an SBS 2008 64 bit server.  We are accessing the files via LAN from XP 32 bit and windows 7 64 bit machines.  The problem doesn't seem to be isloated to the workstation OS.  After speaking with Adobe support (yes we have paid support and they weren't much help) we are now copying files from the server to local drives and accessing the projects that way, but the problems are still occurring. 

I am actually in the process of virtualizing "clean machines" that I can use to run Robo7 and Robo9 on separate virtual PCs.  I was just wondering if i'm wasting my time or if there are known issues with the two builds playing together nicely.  it sounds like their are issues when both versions are installed on the same machine. 

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

I'd suspect that most of your issues are related to damaged projects that got that way when you were working on them over the network. There are many, many warnings on the forums about having projects running on network locations - just because RH lets you do it, doesn't mean that it works :>)

Best practices dictate that you run your project on your c:\projects\project_name\ folder & that you don't let your paths get too long. At the end of the day, zip up your project and back it up to the network. But if you've got multiple people working on topics within the same project, you need to invest in source control.

[Patrick_McNa]

Are there any project integrity checks or repair tools we can run to see if the problem is project corruption, or if we have another issue?  Also, if we are using multiple versions of Robo, we can't really use the Adobe source control, can we?  We had a horrible time with source control support for version 7, and the Adobe engineers basically said it doesn't work.  We're a little shell shocked now about installing the source control for 9.  What source control do you recommend? 

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Repair tools - none that I know of, but Peter, Rick or Colum may know better

From what I've read, support for source control software has gotten better in RH9 than it was in previous versions. I'm not exactly sure why you don't just move everything to RH9. You also don't describe how your shop is laid out - different sizes of operations dictate how to implement source control & what it looks like. Since I work in basically a 1 man shop, I don't use any formalized form of source control other than shouting over to my partner that I'm going to copy the zipped project down to my c:\ drive and work on it. Small places can get away with that level of coordination; larger shops can't. Authors scattered all over the world is another kettle of fish altogether. I see people on the forums using SVN, RoboSource, TFS, etc. with greater or lesser success. Each software has its issues when playing with RH.

[Patrick_McNa]

Well if anyone knows of a way to check the integrity of a Robo project then i'd love to have that info.  We basically have 5 users that could potentially access a project at any time.  Normally we do the "shout across the office" thing also to keep from having any problems.  I'm thinking SVN is probably my best bet for source control because copying projects up and down isn't a long term solution for 5 people.  I appreciate your info and time Jeff. 

[Peter Grainge]

There are no integrity checking tools.

I have 7, 8 and 9 on more than one machine and they all work fine. You cannot have more than one version of Adobe Acrobat on a machine but all the version of RoboHelp play nicely with Acrobat.

As Jeff has identified, you issues are to do with running RoboHelp projects from a network drive, it's a big No No.

I don't use source control but this link has a couple of articles on the subject. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/robohelp.html

I understand why you are not upgrading some projects but I would take a copy of one at least to upgrade it and check it out.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge