RoboHelp10 crashes during development after adding Captivate 7 swf

[ted.adair]

I think I have found the cause of my RH10 crashes, but I am looking for confirmation before launching a 6 month development project.

I am embedding CP7 SWFs in RH10 topics.

ENVIRONMENT

Win 7 64 bit

Dell 2 core, 4GB RAM

RH 10.0.1.292

CP 7.0.1.237

If I embed a CP7 demo as in CASE ONE below, RH crashes while I am working on the project. If I generate, the executable runs flawlessly. The crash is always during development. The exact action leading to the crash appears to be random. The crash occurs unpredictably after working on the project for 5-15 minutes.

If I embed a CP7 demo as in CASE TWO below I have been able to write in RH all day w/o a crash.

What is so evil about the first case?  I suspect an issue with the baggage files, but can’t imagine what.

CASE ONE

The files needed to play the SWF (.swf, .htm, .css and .js) are added as baggage files like this:

   

The link to launch the video works like this:

 

The generated project plays perfectly, like this:

CASE TWO

I clicked inside a topic then did:

 

That gave me a topic like this:

 

I didn’t put the topic above in the TOC. Instead I created a TOC topic that linked to it like this:

 

The generated project plays the topic perfectly, like this:

 

The questions before committing to months of development are:

Did I find the cause of the crash?

Is it safe to commit to major development using RH as in CASE TWO with the expectation that I will not have RH crashing every 10-15 min?

Best,

Ted

[Captiv8r]

Hi Ted

Question here. For your case 1, is Captivate open still? Perhaps with that project loaded? I've seen it where things get really wonky if you work that way. It's as if Captivate still has some hooks in the project even after it has generated the output files.

If that's what you are doing, you might try closing Captivate and see if the crashing stops.

Additionally, it's worth noting that when Captivate creates the output files and you import them as Baggage into RoboHelp, the HTML file Captivate creates will have different coding than you will see if you simply insert a Captivate SWF into a topic.

Apologies in advance if you already knew any of this, but here is my own criteria for co-mingling Captivate with RoboHelp.

If I have a RoboHelp topic that has other information inside and I want that Captivate demo to be viewed right from inside the topic, I'll just insert the SWF. But if that Captivate demo is so large that it really warrants full screen viewing, I'll likely import the files as Baggage and establish a link that points to the Captivate HTML page to open things up.

Not sure if I've managed to actually help here. But hopefully I've done no harm.

Cheers... Rick

[ted.adair]

Thanks Rick.

Your comment about closing Captivate is helpful. I saw the same comment elsewhere on this forum, in regard to the same type of problem. I'll experiment to see if the RH crashes correlate with whether Captivate is running and what files Captivate has open.

Very interesting to know that you are using the same baggage file means of displaying Captivate SWFs that I am using in CASE 1 above. I was thinking that using baggage files instead of Insert>Adobe Captivate Demo was likely to be the cause of my crashes.

Best,

Ted