Malformed Topics

[riggsdar1]

When attempting to generate either a PDF or Word printed documentation from RoboHelp HTML, I get the following errors message near the end of the conversion process:

Warning: The Word Document became corrupt when attempting to append following malformed topics:
<list of topics>

Warning: The Word Document became corrupt when attempting to append a malformed topic: <topic_name>

When looking at the html files, they look no different than the ones processed correctly.

When converting to MSWord, I can start a second conversion just before these "malformed topics" and they are converted correctly, however, that doesn't work if I want to have bookmarks, etc. in the PDF version.

I'm thinking that my help files are just too large for RoboHelp to convert properly. I have over 2000 HTML files and over 2600 images.

Any ideas?

-dar

[TXL_Lori]

I would look at the two following options in the Print Documentation Wizard.

If you are generating a single word document, try choosing the individual documents option.

If you have selected the option to embed images, change it to the link option.

Hope that helps.

-Lori

[Peter Grainge]

If Lori's tips don't fix it for you, take a look at Print Issues on my site. That problem is covered there.

[devjoe]

I have experienced this problem also, and it seemed to be due to the document just being too long. Using Style Mapping.dot as has been recommended elsewhere did not help, and I was already linking to images. It worked when I broke it into two chunks which I can recombine later in Word to generate a PDF with all the bookmarks and everything.

When I examined one of the generated documents (generated with Style Mapping.dot) when I was getting the malformed topics message, I saw that in the last few topics before the malformed ones, styles were getting converted strangely. Stuff that was in one style (which had converted to the Word style with the same name all through the rest of the document) suddenly started showing in a random other style. Some corruption of the HTML-to-Word style mapping seems to be occurring after several hundred topics, and the "malformedness" is probably a result of a style appearing which is not mapped to a valid Word style after the corruption.

[Peter Grainge]

Were these topics created by importing Word documents at some stage in their life?