Help Jumps Converting to Popups - HELP!

[Guest]

Major issue here. I am maintaining a large, nearly 15-year old help system that has thousands of topics and links, and nearly 30 different source Word/RTF files. Suddenly, with no intentional changes whatsoever to my system or the source files, when I compile the project, the jumps that take the user to a different topic are converted to popup links in an entire document, and all of its constituent topics. What is worse is that this behavior is capricious; in some of the documents, when I check their properties, it says the links are popups, but to not compile as such, in other documents, when I check their properties, it says the links are popups, and they do compile as popups.

Here's what I have done and figured out so far: (1) I have checked the styles of the offending links. It seems that a single underlined word compiles as a popup link, and a double-underlined word compiles as a regular jump to a new topic, (2) The offending styles -- and there are dozens per document, thanks to numerous authors over the years and Word's lame handling of styles -- when changed back to the correct style, sometimes keep their style, other times revert back to the wrong style.

I am at wit's end. Does anyone know what to do? Changing to another help platform is not an option.

[Peter Grainge]

I can't help you with the specifics but are you running the project from and generating to your local drive.

Any backups?

With a copy somewhere safe, I would try deleting the RTFs and then reopening the project. That recreates the RTFs from the DOCs and can get rid of corruptions.

Have you changed your version of Word since the proejct was last worked on? If so which version of Word and RH are you using? Also after you upgraded Word, did you uninstall and reinstall RH?

Sorry there is nothing that nails it but one of those might just help.

[Guest]

> Any backups?

Daily. There is no software that I trust so much that I risk losing a day's work!

> With a copy somewhere safe, I would try deleting the RTFs and then reopening the project. That recreates the RTFs from the DOCs and can get rid of corruptions.

I am going to try this. It seems to me that I have done this before when I had problems and it has worked, but I doubt it will this time, as I have tried using a completely unrelated project and had the same problem. But it's worth a try!

> Have you changed your version of Word since the project was last worked on? If so which version of Word and RH are you using? Also after you upgraded Word, did you uninstall and reinstall RH?

No changes since I last used the project, though my company regularly pushes various mandatory Microsoft Security updates. (I am on XP as an OS. Word 2002, and am using RH X5.) It hasn't been that long since I used the project, so there haven't been that many OS updates since.

My suspicion is that RoboHelp has somehow gone hinky, and perhaps there was a MS update that did it. I just downloaded and installed the 5.02 patch, and will try that. I will try the RTF fix next, and if that doesn't work, I guess it's time to uninstall/reinstall. If that doesn't work, I guess I will need to try a different machine. If that doesn't work...I guess it may be time to look for a new job!

Thanks for your help!