MadCap Software Forums

Hi,
I'm wondering if it's reasonable that it takes 7 hours to create Doc-2-Help output?
Both NetHelp & HTMLHelp take 7 hours (each)
My Word document is BIG - 700 pages (185K words)
Thanks,
Eran.

Are you working from, or building to, a network location?

Everything is done locally, and computer is 'strong' enough (memory, disk, cpu etc.)

Am office with 100MB high speed connection to the web.
If it helps - here is a snapshot showing it took 12 hours to create the 'internediate' files.

Hi,

maybe it helps if you choose Internet Explorer (9 or newer) as default browser, before you start compilation.
Yet, I can only guess, since I do not have Chrome browser on my machines.
Actually, I cannot believe that C1H_html is responsible for the 12 hours compile time.

Kind Regards,
Sabine Kamprowski

I changed the default browser from Chrome to IE(11). It didnt make much difference.

On the output Tab -
"Processing HTML file" - goes to 50% fairly quickly - and then slowly taks ~12 hours until it reaches 99%
Any ideas? or maybe it's just the time it takes to parse a 750 pages document?

Another question (from a Flare user, so I'm clutching at straws), what format are your images? I'm wondering if they are .bmp or a compressed format.

Hi,

I agree with SteveS: pictures might cause delays. Additional question: Do you have a great number of links in your document? I observed that they could be responsible when D2H hangs while processing html files. Watching the status bar at the bottom of D2H window you may see which html file D2H is working on. Could you please check whether this topic has any links to other topics??
What happens when you remove source of this topic from your source document? Does D2H go slow at a later topic or does the issue disappear?

Kind regards,
Sabine Kamprowski

Hi,

I would suggest to make a copy of the project for testing purposes and split its source document in at least 10 separate documents. This way, you can determine the place of the problem more easily.
Might well be the case that there is no problem, just the size of the source document. One of my D2H projects has a source of approx. 1300 pages. But it is split in more than 20 source documents. Compile time is no more than 10 minutes (Word target or online target).

Kind regards
Jack Konings

Hi Jack,

I have only 40 images max 40K size (really small) so I dont think the images are responsible for this.

Quick recap:
1) All the stages until "Processing HTML file..." pass very quickly! (under 1 minute)
These are:
- Processing fields... DONE
- Processing lists paragraphs... DONE
- Converting lists to text... DONE
- Converting image map to pictures... DONE
- Saving preprocessed document... DONE
- Preparing HTML file... DONE
...Up until here it's less than 1 minute!
- Processing HTML file...
==> This takes 10 hours!
It advances slowly top-by-topic Processing: a, Processing b, Processing c, etc.

1) Since 99% of the time is spend in "Processing HTML file..." stage -
Maybe the size of the input Word document has already no effect in that phase? (as it has already been parsed)?

2) If you still think splitting the Word-doc might improve performance -
What can be the best practice for me to split my one large file into X smaller documents? (including the table of contents etc.)
So Doc-to-help will still handle this multiple-split-files configuration?
I'm thinking createing a pre-Doc-to-help procedure (manually or automatically) to split the big file into smaller ones.
Thanks in advance,
Eran.

Hi eranmore,

1) at the point of 'processing HTML file', the file to be processed is indeed some sort of html file, but still contains all contents. Only when writing the output files the individual topics are split. So the size could still may have effect

2) First of all, I assume no table of contents is included in the source file. If so, remove it from the source file. D2H will create the toc for whatever output type automatically. It does not matter how many source documents you have in your project.
I tested your case here by including a single source file of approx. 1100 pages, hundreds of screen shots and 340K words.
Compile to nethelp 2.0 took about 10 minutes. So I guess we can rule out the size of the word document.
My first guess is that there is a problem in the contents. To localize the possible problem more easily, I still recommend splitting up your source files in several files.
For this, create a new D2H project, split up your source file and import the source files in the project.
Now, during compile you can monitor the compile time needed for each document. Additionally, you may also check the compile log file in the Temp/BuildLogs directory in your project directory.
Please post your findings.

Best regards
Jack