V11 Skin Causing "Object reference not set" Error

[kwag_myers]

I thought about bumping this thread, ERROR: Object reference not set to an instance of an object, but the problem really started when I switched from v10. Long-story-short, I'm on a new machine and Tech Support loaded v11. Now the project I am working on won't build an HTML5 output. What's really puzzling is that I started the project over and was systematically adding things, topics, images, etc. At quitting time yesterday, no issues. This morning, the first attempt resulted in the error. I backed out my last two items from yesterday but have yet to get a build.

I should also mention that this is the only project that won't build. Plus, WebHelp and no skin both build successfully. As soon as I add an HTML5 skin I get the error.

This particular project has some unique features: two master pages (Different Master Page for Startup Topic?), Dave Lee's jQuery script for adding the skin.css, and no topic toolbar. All of which I have tried omitting from the original project, and had no issue when I first added them to the new project.

[kkelleher]

We run into this error pretty frequently (in v10), and have had to get help from MadCap Tech Support. In many cases, once we identified the file causing the issue, we've been able to fix it by adding blank lines (returns) to the end of the offending file. If you can't figure out which file is causing the error, MadCap Tech Support can probably take a look at your project and tell you.

Thanks,

Kristen

[kwag_myers]

Thanks for the reply. At one point I used comment tags in a suspected topic to remove all content and systematically add each paragraph.

Once I identified the skin as the cause, I was able to open the file in a text editor to reference my settings and start over (again). Since this was my first HTML5 skin, I had several settings (properties) that I didn't need and my guess is one of these was the cause as my new skin worked find. Then I was informed that we're going to a top nav deliverable. So, starting over again x3.

[amitkapoor]

I faced thesame issue with SideNav skin. The reason came out to be img tag not closing properly in the Master Page. Once I added / to > and made it />, the issue disappeared. Interestingly, I copied the original code from Tripane theme output and there it was like this but in SideNav - Flare didnt like img tag closing without "/".