Hanging while trying to build HTML help

[KKolo66]

I am testing this app out to see if it will meet our needs.

I imported a RoboHelp project.

All seemed to go well.

i tried Generating th Microsoft HTML Help (chm)

and for the past 6 hours the build progress has been Very Slowly ...

"Generating concept and keyword anchors in output files..." (this is the last message in the Build Progress window).

I am using MadCap Flare 8
on Windows 7 64bit.

BTW - The progress bars are moving just very slowly for this particular section


Any ideas why this might be happening?

Thanks, Kathy

[Nita Beck]

Welcome to the forums, Kathy!

Sorry that your first test is not working out as you had expected. But don't despair yet. Although you say that everything appeared to go OK in the import of the RoboHelp project, I suspect there might be some non-XML files that Flare is hanging on during the build. It definitely should not take that long to build a .chm file. It should take minutes. My largest .chm targets build in under 5 minutes. I'm also using Flare 8 and Windows 7 64-bit.

I suggest that you add a report to the Flare project and have Flare look for "non-XML topics." If it finds any, you will need to fix those files, or temporarily conditionalize them so they are excluded from the build.

I've converted a good number of RoboHelp projects to Flare. (Yeah! I have no more RoboHelp projects! Sorry... I digress...) For as much as the import process is pretty quick as software processes go, in my experience the overall *human* process takes a bit longer for a successful import. I had to do a lot of clean up in the RoboHelp project to get it prepped for pulling into Flare, and after import, I had to do more clean up in Flare to clear out all the bloat in the code that RoboHelp had imposed.

Anyone else have an idea to help Kathy out?

[KKolo66]

Thanks Nita,

I will look into the non-xml report you suggested.
I have a lot of learning to do and (unfortunately) not a lot of time to do it.

I'm going to take the time to go through the video tutorials and getting started docs. But, I am sure I will be coming here for more help.

Thanks again!

Kathy

[KKolo66]

This is interesting...

I did a Critical Issues Report which included non-xml topics. ... this is what I got.

Broken Bookmarks: 9
Broken Links: 20
Broken Snippet Links: (no data)
Database Errors: (no data)
Non-XML Topics: (no data)
Undefined Condition Tags: (no data)
Undefined Glossary Term Links: (no data)
Undefined Variables: (no data)

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,
Kathy