CS6:  Adobe Help Manager - PDF download/extraction error

Nice work guys, this worked a treat! One thing not mentioned is the cached version of the chc preference file. That might be something to add to the notes, if it needs to be removed.

Hi Mark

This trick did not worked for me : I'm still in "Download Pending" with all Help PDF of all CS6 applications I have installed.

Any news from your engineering team ?

May be they can make a special debug release and send it to some customers having the issue to track the problem ...

reply from windows cannot be founr ty anyway

Hi Mark

I was almost sure that this issue was related to our proxy, so I decided to trace the dialog between HelpManager and our proxy.

I used a HTTP sniffer called Charles  ( demo downloadable here:  http://www.charlesproxy.com/ ) to trace everything.

Bingo !

HelpManager has some problems talking with the proxy ( authentication issues ).

If you are interessed, I can mail you the log created by my sniffer to allow your engineering team to investigate.

Hereafter are some screen shots of the trace :

As you can see, it's very short :

1) the first HEAD failed (normal) : the proxy request an NTLM authentication

HEAD #1 request :

HEAD #2 answer :

2) the 2nd HEAD failed :

HelpManager did not respected the NTLM authentication method requested by our proxy !

HEAD #2 request :

HEAD #2 answer : error 403 !

3) then a POST is made :

Failed because the authentication is bad  (not NTLM, as expected by our proxy)

POST request :

POST answer : error 403

4) then a GET is made on the URL :

http://www.adobe.com/support/chc/update/400/fr_FR/update.xml

This time, the authentication negotiation between HelpManager and the proxy is OK, but the last GET failed : error 404, the requested xml file is not found on your site !

GET #3 request :

GET #3 answer : error 404

Mark, I hope these informations will help your engineering team to correct this issue !

Feel free to request complementary information if needed.

Best regards,

Didier Nicolas

Thanks so much for the extra information, Didier.   Mark has passed this on to the engineering team.

Hi Kirsti!

Any news from the engineering team about a fix concerning Help Manager ?

Regards,

Didier Nicolas

Hi, Didier,

I don't have an answer right now (it is a holiday weekend in the US).  But I've pinged Mark to find out.

--Kirsti

These directions are misleading on how to find the Library folder in 10.7.

"Tip:   To find this directory on Mac OSX 10.7, open the Terminal application and enter the following: "chflags nohidden ~/Library/” and execute."

That command merely un-hides it, and you still need to navigate to it. I was trying, to no avail, to enter "chflags nohidden ~/Library/” into Terminal, and run as a command, only to seemingly have nothing happen.

A more direct method to actually open the Library folder is to

1. In the Finder, choose Go > Go To Folder
2. In the Go To Folder dialog, type ~/Library
3. Click "Go"

Other techniques I found were on this page -
http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/access-hidden-user-library-files.html

You can also just hold the Option key while navigating to "Go" then Library appears as an option.

It is March 1, 2013 and this problem continues (on a new MBP with a fresh install of all software). Adobe's help system began to deteriorate with the release of CS5 and has only become worse in all respects over the past two-and-one-half years.

It is now March 31, 2013 and I also am having this same problem. When I search for %appdata%/chc.4875E02D9FB21EE389F73B8D1702B320485DF8CE.1  in Windows 7, it doesn't exist. I am on the Cloud. If I search for the numbers only 4875E02D9FB21EE389F73B8D1702B320485DF8CE then it finds the application.xml file. Should I delete the xml file?

If the folder does not exists, it usually indicates that 'Adobe Help Manager' was never launched on the machine successfully, or that the user had no write permissions to the folder %appdata%, or that the folder was modified.

Look for a folder called, C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\Adobe\ and delete the 'Help' and 'PDF' folder therein. Restart 'Adobe Help Manager' and start your download process.

If you are behind a proxy, allow the program 'Adobe Help' to pass through and access the internet.

Regards,

Sandeep

Hi,

If you are behind a proxy, allow the program 'Adobe Help' to pass through and access the internet. Also, have you been able to locate the folders above and delete the contents there-in?

Regards,

Sandeep

Instead of laying this problem off on users, why doesn't Adobe FIX IT!!  It is, after all, Adobe's poor design, and incompetent implementation that causes the problems, and lazy, (some would argue, abusive) tech support that waste days and days of user effort trying to fix the unfixable:

1. For MC users it takes over 4 hours just to delete the recommended directories, and if deleted to recycle bin / trashcan, another 4 hours to "empty".  Perhaps this is because somehow Adobe has managed to push the number of required files to support offline help for 18 applications to over 48,000, many of which a lower than the base disk cluster size, therefore wasting a TON of extra disk space.
2. Even after following the instructions, Help Manager does SOME of the necessary downloads, then will hang for days on the alert, "Please wait while downloaded files are extracted.  Extracting large files may take a few minutes."  HM only downloaded 685 MBytes, so, after 6 days of non-stop "extracting" it should be done, don't you think?
3. If you close that alert, power down and restart your machine, restart Help Manager, then you get stuck at the "pending integration" phase for the help files that users must download manually because help manager can't: i.e. Adobe Media Encoder, Premiere Pro, and Using Acrobat Pro X.
4. HM does NOT download all the files that are available - see partial list in 3 above.
5. HM does NOT integrage help files into their respective appliations.  You can only access ONLINE help from the help menu / F1 key even if HM successfully downloads and 'integrates' a particular apps help file.

If we are to assume that the same engineering talent that produced the CS applications also produced Help Manager, then it is not a case of incompetence, but rather a clear attempt to frustrate users into remaining 'connected' in order to use their products with full help available.  And that means all these problems were designed into Help Manager as the "softening up" bombardment before the "Creative Cloud" attack on users.

It is time for Adobe to either fess up to that fact, or if it was sheer incompetence and "hack work", fix it, and put out a proper Help Manager update.

wmc

It appears adobe help manager can no longer access help pdfs to automatically update. The UPDATE button is grayed out. I downloaded some manually. It still doesn't work when you put them in the correct directory and hit F1 within a CS6 program. Very frustrating Adobe, please fix. Offline help is basic functionality. I wish you would go back to the original help program rather than just giving us a .pdf manual.