Word not creating PDF output. (w:t tag error)

[Harxy]

Hi there,

We have this old project sitting around gathering e-dust that is now being dragged out of retirement. Anyhow, I think that it was once created with Blaze, but since that day, it has only ever been very minorly edited and then outputted to PDF... this has always worked fine.

Now it would be vastly beneficial if this could be outputted in a Word file so that anyone can edit it. I created a Word target, set the variables, conditions, masterpages and TOC and let it fly. It did not fly well.

After throwing a lot of autonumber issues, it eventually bricked on this cryptic message:

Internal Error: the 'w:t' start tag on line 10 does not match the end tag of 'b'. Line 10, position 91901.

This is strange. It doesn't mention which topic this occured in but I have tried removing every topic and adding them one at a time and it seems like many different topics could be causing it, which of course leads me to suspect something in the Master pages or in the stylesheet. But further to that I am a little at a loss.

Has anyone seen this message before?

[LTinker68]

If you create a new project from scratch and copy a couple of the topics into the new project (but not the stylesheet, masterpage, or page layout) do you still get the same error?

[wclass]

Are you creating Word or PDF output? Just trying to work out which step in the workflow you are up to.
If you are building a Word output when the error happens, when you see the error on the Erros tab, flick to the Messages tab and see which was the last document to be processed - then I'd look in there for problem styles. Could be a problem with a glossary or TOC rather than a specific topic. However, the "w:t" reference is a specific internal Word tag, so it shouldn't be in your Flare topics to start with.

[Harxy]

Hi both and thanks for helping...

LTinker - if I make a new project and copy in those topics, I get an even more cryptic fail message... (see attachment).

wclass - I'm making a Word output - the pdf works fine. I have searched around for problem styles to no avail - everything looks perfectly normal.

For the record, there doesn't seem to be any w:t tags in my project that I can see or the find/replace can find....

All very peculiar....

[LTinker68]

When you did the find/replace for w:t, did you have it set to search in source code?

Also, what version of Word are you using?

[Harxy]

Hi LTinker,

Yeah, that's with find in source code ticked... no sign of it in the whole project...

I'm using Word 2010.

thanks

[LTinker68]

Are you still using Blaze? I think Word 2010 came out before MadCap stopped making Blaze, but if not, that could be causing the problem (i.e., Blaze wasn't updated to work with Word 2010).

If you create a new project from scratch, do nothing to the project, then build Word output, do you still get the error? If you do, then you've eliminated your original project as the problem and the issue is with Blaze or Word 2010 or the combination of the two. In that case, you'd have to contact MadCap Support to see if there's anything they can do without you having to upgrade to Flare.

[Harxy]

Oh sorry - I should have been clear. It was made in Blaze (I think) but it has at some point been converted to Flare. It's Flare I'm trying to output it in.

My copy of Flare builds Word perfectly for some of my other projects...

[LTinker68]

Hmmm. You might want to contact MadCap Support for help. The only other thing I can think of is that the w:t tag is in a file other than a topic or stylesheet since those are the only two file types you can search through using Flare's built-in find-and-replace tool. I'm not sure how the tags could have gotten somewhere else other than a topic, but Support might be able to help you find it.

[marchenland]

Strangely enough, I'm getting this error, too. What's strange is that I am making copies of an existing, working TOC/target. Some copies throw this error; others do not. I can't see any rhyme or reason why some work and others don't.

In case you're wondering, I'm generating multiple copies, editing the TOC down, and then generating a new Word target so that I can distribute content to be edited to a number of different people. Each target is a subset of the whole. I'd assumed it was to do with the editing down of the TOC, so I tried duplicating the TOC and generating the target without doing any editing to the TOC. Still got the error.

Any ideas? I'm mystified.