RoboHelp 10: Problems generating Printed Documentation

Question

Environment
Windows 7 Enterprise, Service Pack 1, 64-bit operating system
Office Professional Plus 2010 Versions 14.0.7106.5001 (64-bit)
RoboHelp 10: 10.0.0.287
Visual Studio 2010 Professional. I open RoboHelp from within Source Control (have been doing it for two years).
Problem
Sometime after moving to RoboHelp 10, and even after successfully generating Printed Documentation output, I encountered a major problem generating Printed Documentation from RoboHelp: “Internal error encountered. Failed to generated Printed Documentation”. The error occurred when I tried to generate Printed Doc using my default TOC, which looks something like this:
Topic A
Topic B
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Topic C
Topic D
Based on an old Peter Grainge reply to someone about a similar problem, I removed all but the first topic from the Chapter Layout pane and generated the Help. Everything was fine until I got to the topics after Book 3. At that point everything started to fail again. When I removed Topics C, D, etc. from the Chapter Layout pane, the output was built successfully.
I tried moving Topics C, D, etc. to the top of the Chapter Layout pane, and got the same error. I tried creating a new folder and put Topics C, D, etc. into that folder. Failure after failure.
As an experiment, I removed all the Topics C, D, etc from the Chapter Layout pane, but then added them to the Print Document Section Layout pane (not where I want them). The Printed Documentation built successfully.
During attempts to build with Topics C, D, etc. in the Chapter Layout pane, I kept getting a Word error: Word is trying to recover your information. After that there was always a failure.
Selecting PDF as the output did not work when the Topic C, D, etc. files were at the bottom of the Chapter Layout pane.
I create a new TOC and a new Printed Documentation SSL. Failed to generate.
As a matter of reference, I've been generating Printed Documentation from the same TOC for more than a year and so cannot figure out what has changed in RoboHelp or Word to cause this grief .
Has anyone experienced anything like this?
Carol

Answer 1

Dear Peter,
Thanks for following up. Last Friday I finished extensive testing on my own and working with RoboHelp Support. Here's what I sent to Support this morning.
If after reading this screed, you think it worthwhile for me to get a copy from Source Control for you to look at, I will do so. Thanks for offering to look at it.
Environment
Windows 7 Enterprise Service Pack 1, 8.00 GB RAM, 64-bit OS
Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Version 14.0.7106.5003 64-bit--Note: We repaired my current version of Word, in case that was the problem, but did not reinstall Office--we do not think that the Word version is the problem because we generated successfully with other TOCs and when generating individual documents.
RoboHelp 10.0.1.292. Upgraded from RoboHelp 9 in May 2013. Replaced hard drive in September 2013 and reinstalled RoboHelp.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional 10.0.40219.1 SP1Rel (I open the project from Source Control and check files out to a folder on my desktop.)
Issue
Printed Documentation failed multiple times with the default Table of Contents, which contains all the topics in the project. TOC specs are as follows:
Properties: .docx, desktop location, no conditions, embedded images, “Generate a single document”, “Retain hyperlinks”.
330 files, 12 top-level books, 15 second-level books, 7 third-level books, 6 fourth-level books, and 8 fifth-level books
Results
Generation to Printed Documentation does NOT fail for other, module-specific TOCs, nor to WebHelp Pro SSLs for the same sets of topics. In addition, and perhaps more important, generation to Printed Documentation does NOT fail with “Generate Individual Documents” selected, or when there are approximately fewer than 259 files in the TOC.
Did not fail consistently based on any particular topic.
Did not fail consistently based on location of any particular topic in the TOC.
Failed when I created new TOCs based on ‘working’ TOCs. For example, copied a module-specific TOC and then added topics to it from the default (superset) TOC. I did this in case the original default TOC was corrupted.
Failed when I create a new TOC with the same folder/file structure from scratch.
Failed when I created a new TOC with a flat file structure from scratch.
Failed when I retrieved an older TOC from the last release of the product.
Failed when I created new SSLs each time. I did this in case the SSLs had got corrupted.
Failed when I did not open the project from Source Control (removed project from Source Control and worked locally).
Began to see failure when there were more than about 258-263 files in the TOC. For example, successfully generated Printed Documentation with 262 files in the TOC. Added one topic and the generation failed. Removed that topic and added several others, one at a time. Consistently failed. To test this, I created a TOC with all the files in a flat structure, generated a report for the TOC, printed it, and counted the number of files. I then began deleting files and regenerating the Printed Document to try to identify the number of files in the TOC when the generation failed. Successfully generated up to about 258 files and then it began failing. (Occasional successes at 260 and 261, but that may be because I didn’t always consistently remove the Glossary and Index from the Chapter Layout pane.)
Other Comments
(I know that we should generally post non-RH issues to other forums, but in this case I wanted to include all potentially related issues in this posting.)
The first time you generate any type of output, the “Critical error of Source Control Provider. Please restart IDE.” Message appears. This message appears behind RoboHelp. As a result, if the RoboHelp window is maximized, you think that RoboHelp is hung. Forcing a close of RoboHelp leaves the partially generated Word document in an unstable state. When you re-open RoboHelp and try to generate the output again, RoboHelp says that the output is in use. Unfortunately, there is no way to ‘free’ the Word document and you have to restart the computer. In addition, when the dialog box is hidden, even using Alt+Tab to find the dialog box is complicated because you can’t grab it and click OK until RoboHelp completes its processing. The workaround is to reduce the size of the application window so that you can see the dialog box and try to quickly grab it and click OK. That said, as soon as processing is complete you can grab the dialog box and click OK; at that point RoboHelp displays its own error message about the success or failure of the output generation. It is not clear whether the RoboHelp API or Source Control puts up this error message, but it’s definitely a problem until you happen upon the workaround.
RoboHelp does not check SSLs even when I right-click the SSL in the Single Source Layouts pane, click Check In, select the XML and SSL files, and leave “Keep checked out” deselected. The red check mark remains next to the SSL name. In addition, even when I Check In All files before closing the project, the next time I open the project RoboHelp displays a series of Check In dialog boxes requiring me to check them in again.
When RoboHelp hangs during a Printed Documentation failure and the Version Control setting is to check in all files when closing a project (which I’ve now deselected to avoid this problem), Ctrl+Alt+Del indicates that you cannot shut down the program because RoboHelp is waiting for a response. Yes, RoboHelp was waiting for me to check in some files (because of the Version Control setting), but hid the Check In Source Files dialog box behind the application. This usually left a Word document in limbo, forcing me to restart the computer.
At one point RoboHelp stopped saving changes to an SSL after I made changes and clicked Save and Generate. Each time I reopened the SSL, I had to select .docx, etc. all over again.
Carol