Publish to PDF - problems with "Include help project" option

[mbgg]

I have several independent .CHM projects that I want to combine into one PDF file. I created a new project and added all of the independent ones using the "Insert new topic - Include help project" option.
However each of the independent projects has a topic called "General options" that is in a seperate file and was added to each CHM project using the "Insert new topic - Include help project" option.
I want this "General options" topic to appear only once in the PDF (at the beginning or the end), so -
- in each of the independnt CHM projects I set the "Include in builds" for this topic to "HTML (CHM)"
- I then added the topic to the PDF project using the same "Insert new topic - Include help project" option.
The topic is added to the Table of Contents, but with a small red exclamation mark. The topic is not included in the PDF document when I publish.

Any suggestions?

[Tim Green]

Hi Michael,

I have several independent .CHM projects

It's very important to understand that there is no such thing as a "CHM project" in Help+Manual. Unlike some other help tools, HM doesn't force you to define an output type for a project. So your projects are always just HM projects, that can be exported to any output format at any time.

When combining projects in a single master project that will publish them as a single help system it is very important to avoid topic ID collisions between the projects. You are effectively blending all the projects into a single project, and topic IDs must always be unique. If your modules contain topics with the same IDs they will overwrite each other when you publish and you will get all kinds of strange errors. (This doesn't appear to be your problem here, I'm just including this information because it's so important.) See this topic for more details on this:

http://www.helpandmanual.com/help/index ... ar_ids.htm

However each of the independent projects has a topic called "General options" that is in a seperate file and was added to each CHM project using the "Insert new topic - Include help project" option.

That is fine, although for single topics it is generally more practical to use snippets rather than entire project modules. Within projects, each topic is actually a separate file as well, so this is also quite possible.

I want this "General options" topic to appear only once in the PDF (at the beginning or the end), so -
- in each of the independnt CHM projects I set the "Include in builds" for this topic to "HTML (CHM)"
- I then added the topic to the PDF project using the same "Insert new topic - Include help project" option.

This is also fine.

The topic is added to the Table of Contents, but with a small red exclamation mark. The topic is not included in the PDF document when I publish.

This means that the project you have inserted can't be found -- either its name was changed since you inserted it or the folder reference to the location of the project you are inserting is no longer up to date. The easiest solution is to delete it and re-insert it. Here too, since it is just a single topic, it would be easier to use a snippet.

[mbgg]

The "General options" project has multiple topics.
I tried adding the project (using the "Insert new topic - Include help project" option) several times (at different locations) using the browse feature; all project files are in the same folder and other projects link to it, so obviously "it can't be found" is not the problem.

Note that this "PDF project" consists entirely of other projects that were added using the "Insert new topic - Include help project" option. Some of these 'other projects' also have projects that were added using the same option. After some more testing I have concluded that none of these 'sub-projects' can be successfully added directly to the "PDF project" using the same option (the red exclamtion mark is displayed in the ToC); other projects can be added multiple times.

As I mentioned previously, setting the "include" option of these sub-projects' to CHM only does not solve the problem.

[Tim Green]

Hi Michael,

so obviously "it can't be found" is not the problem.

If you are getting a red exclamation mark then that would normally be the problem. From your description it sounds as though there is some kind of mixup here, possibly with duplicate topic IDs across your projects. Discussing it isn't going to help here, however. I need to have a look at it. Please mail the master project and the project you are unable to insert to me at support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) and I will check them for you.