Upper size limit on topics

[bunnycat]

Has anyone experienced bad Flare behavior on large topics?
I have one or two topics in a developer reference that are large (in terms of topic length) but only 300 KB on disk. (ok, I guess that's large in terms of an all-text file)
Flare chokes on them - I cannot use the XML editor or the text editor inside Flare because it hangs completely (window goes black and I get the loading spinner and then it crashes). Looks to me like Flare processes increase in memory usage until it hangs/crashes.

I tried to split the topics up along H2's or H3 level (as if I were doing an import from FrameMaker or Word) but it makes so many individual files (hundreds!) it's not practical either from an authoring standpoint and I know Flare doesn't handle hundreds of files in a single directory very well either.

As a workaround I arbitrarily split the large topic into 2 files at the halfway mark. It's a hack - but it seems to relieve some of the hanging/crashing (at least until I add a bunch more developer references).

Any ideas? Thanks!

CAT

[devjoe]

We do have some topics that large, but we haven't experienced the problems you describe, though they can be slow to work in. In our large topics, there are either long tables of information or many equations which are embedded into the topic as MathML. It might depend on what kind of content you have in them or the amount of memory available on your computer.

[ChoccieMuffin]

Sadly, yes, I've found this. And it's worse if you're looking at a PDF layout, so changing to Web layout makes things a little bit better. Not brilliant, but better. And sadly I don't have any other suggestions, other than to raise a bug with Madcap and see what happens.

[bunnycat]

I suspected it would be like that. Thank you though, for the corroboration in behavior. Ah well, will submit another bug to support.

CAT

[Nita Beck]

Another workaround is to put the subsections into snippets and then insert the snippets into the topic. That way, you can edit the individual snippets more easily (hopefully) than trying to edit the long topic. Note that you might want to have the subsection headings be "live" in the topic but have the rest of their content be in snippets. That way, you can bookmark and then point xrefs to the subsection headings in the topic.

FWIW, I usually do my editing in web layout view so that Flare has to do the least amount of rendering in the XML Editor of a topic's underlying code. I rarely edit while in print layout mode.