Generating WEBHELP in Robohelp 9 results in ERRORS and crashing

[Guest]

"The instruction at "0x0a58cf6a" referenced memory at "0x00000014" . The memory could not be 'read'. Click ok to terminate the program.

There's another message that reads: "Adobe Robohelp 9 has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Please tell Microsoft about  the problem.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Going to need more info than this - O/S, amount of memory, location of project to start with

[Peter Grainge]

That can be the sign of an output topic that has been imported into the source files.

You will see some red squares when you view the topic in RoboHelp. If that is it, see http://www.robowizard.com/RoboWizard/NewProject.htm#MonthlyScry/062004.htm for information on cleaning up the topic.

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@petergrainge

[Wkugelman]

Upon examining the project source folder in the above PC, we found a 3rd party CSS file and some older PDF files  that, when removed from the source folder, allowed the project to generate WebHelp without crashing. It seemed that RH9 was crashing during full text search generation, most likely due to the pdf files.

Has anyone else had issues with RH9 and CSS or pdf files?

[Peter Grainge]

I am aware of a couple of users who have had problems caused by some corrupt PDFs so I suspect that was the cause of your problem.

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@petergrainge

[Wkugelman]

Thanks for responding Peter,

The PDFs in question were generated in an earlier version of acrobat, and when RH9 first encountered them it shot up an error dialog stating that PDF's created prior to Acrobat 9 would cause problems with RH9 and indeed they did. We're trying to recompile them to a newer compatibility setting...

That was not unexpected, but did you see our other issue about RH not finding Word 2010 on our machines?  Clicking "Printed Documentation" brought up the error, but right clicking it , selecting "properties" and then "Save and Generate" DID find Word installed. Even on subsequent generations,it still needs the latter approach.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/841972

That was a new one for me, care to hazard a guess?

Thanks for all your help,

Will

[SueC2009]

Hello,

I have this same issue. I have a small online help that includes a topic with links to about 50 PDFs. Some of the PDFs were generated with older versions of Acrobat, and during generation it crashes with the same error message. I was originally able to get around this by disabling full-text search, however, in my current version of the help file, I needed to add a couple of PDFs and I get the message again, despite the fact that I disabled the Search tab...

Were you able to find a fix for this? Adobe support could not help me.

[Captiv8r]

Hi Sue

I have a suggestion that might help. Only trying it will actually tell.

Take a single PDF that seems to work just fine and copy it repeatedly.Name each successive copy identical to the assorted PDF files you need in the project. Ensure they are all inside the same folder. Generate. After you generate, you should have about 50 copies of the same PDF in the folder. Then copy over the real PDFs into the output folder.

My thought here is that this will allow you to generate and get the workable output. And by replacing the PDFs afterwards, your links will be intact.

The only fly in this ointment is that the content of the PDFs won't be searchable doing things this way. But if all you are wanting to do is link to them, that may be acceptable.

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

[Peter Grainge]

Sue

You haven't confirmed that you are getting this problem with RoboHelp 9. There was a known problem with RoboHelp 8 that Adobe advised was fixed in RoboHelp 9.

See Item 22 in http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh8/using_rh8.htm. Even if you are using RoboHelp 9, it could be worth a try.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[SueC2009]

Hello again,

Sorry for the long silence. I was in release/panic mode, which incidently is always when I discover a new problem with my Robohelp projects.

Yes, this is happenning in Robohelp 9, not Robohelp 8. I thought I might post my own workaround, even though it's not elegant...it might help someone who desperately has to get a project generated and has the same problem.

There are 50 or so PDFs attached as baggage and link to from one of my topics. The PDFs were created between 2006 and 2011, by various writers, usign various versions of Acrobat.

There is one thing that remained common throughout all my testing, and I tried resaving the PDFs, optimizing them, using different compatibilities etc.

I also tried generating the project on different systems, and using different operating systems (XP or Windows 7) -- the result was always the same:

"The instruction at "0x0a58cf6a" referenced memory at "0x00000014" . The memory could not be 'read'. Click ok to terminate the program.

The one constant was this: if the total size of the baggage files did not exceed approx. 25 MB, the conversion would run. It would take a bit longer than usual, but it would complete normally. No matter which PDFs I swapped out, the result was the same...so, I took a dummy PDF file of a about 100 kb, renamed this dummy file to the "real" PDF names of the larger PDFs, in order to get the total size of the 50 PDFs to under 25 MB.

So, let's say I had

PDF A = 5 MB

PDF B = 8 MB

I would rename my dummy.pdf to PDF A.pdf and so instead of chewing up 5 MB of the 25 MB total, that file would now only be 100 kb.

I hope this explanation makes sense...

Then after my helpset was converted, I replaced those PDFs in the output with their "real" large versions. So all the links worked and my help was generated.

This solution is less than ideal, and it's a pain to do this every time I need to submit, but this is the ONLY way I can get this to work.

Peter, thank you for the information regarding RH 8 and how this issue was supposed to be fixed in RH 9. But..I don't take much stock in Adobe's claims to fix certain things. One of the bugs I submitted for release 9 and which was supposed to be fixed in the "Critical update" is certainly not fixed (that issue is: Style mapping of FrameMaker content containing certain special characters in xrefs not honored in RoboHelp ). This is not an attack on Adobe, just my own personal experience (which has made me a wee bit jaded. :-)) When I don't run into issues I can't fix, I think RH is awesome. 😉

[Peter Grainge]

You should report this, especially about the wall you hit at 25mb.

The more people who report a bug or request a feature, the more likely it is to be actioned. Please follow this link.

http://www.Adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform&product=38

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@petergrainge

[SueC2009]

Thanks Peter. I did contact support and sent them a copy of my project but they, too, were not able to figure out why this was happenning. However, you are right, perhaps reporting it will lead to a different avenue and maybe someone else will figure out the problem. I'm going to do that.

I will let you know if anything comes out of it.

[SueC2009]

Hello again,

I just wanted to pop in here because I noticed an error in my post above. The issue arises when the total size of all PDFs exceeds about 125 MB, not 25 MB as I stated above.