Help & Manual Not Responding Upon Publish Request

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Jen Dembiczak
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Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 3:05 pm

Help & Manual Not Responding Upon Publish Request

Unread post by Jen Dembiczak »

I need to publish my projects today and at first H&M was loading everything really slow, and my WebHelp outputs were having unknown errors on properly Topic ID'd pages... but now H&M won't publish at all. I open my project, hit Publish button and H&M goes instantly to "Not Responding."

I've tried bringing my projects to a local network location.
I've tried closing all unnecessary applications in my Task Manager.
I've even tried uninstalling/reinstalling H&M all together.
No luck.

I cannot meet my work deadline due to this issue. Please help.
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Tim Green
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Re: Help & Manual Not Responding Upon Publish Request

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Jen,

This is unusual and almost certainly related to your network connection. Don't put your projects on a network drive at all. Move both them AND your output folder to a local drive on your computer, so that no network access is involved at all. This also applies to all the external assets (graphics and snippets). In your project, look in Configuration > Common Properties > Project Search Path and make sure that there are no folders there located on network drives. In particular, folders listed there that are not currently available will cause a massive slowdown. This is because Windows is still very bad about resolving references to non-available network connections. It can take up to minutes for each one.

If you do have path references on network drives move the contents to a local folder, delete the old references and add new ones to the new location.

Also open Windows Task Manager and view the Performance tab while publishing to make sure that you are not running out of memory or disk space.

Also make sure that your Help+Manual installation is up to date. You can check your version in Help > About. We just updated to 7.5, so if you have an earlier version download the current installer here and install on top of your current copy to update:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html?upd
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Jen Dembiczak
Posts: 7
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 3:05 pm

Re: Help & Manual Not Responding Upon Publish Request

Unread post by Jen Dembiczak »

I will try this, but then why is another user, referencing the same network location able to proceed to publish? We've both checked our task managers during the process and she's running more applications than I when mine fails and hers publishes.
Jen Dembiczak
Posts: 7
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 3:05 pm

Re: Help & Manual Not Responding Upon Publish Request

Unread post by Jen Dembiczak »

Latest version of H&M installed (computer restarted)
projects and all search path images/supplementary files moved to local folder locations
Search path updated to local location only

Publish button outcome is the same, Help & Manual locks/"Not Responding".
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Tim Green
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Re: Help & Manual Not Responding Upon Publish Request

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Jen,

This is very strange. Please try with a different project -- for example create a new project with the standard empty topics it generates and try publishing that. Does it work?
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Jen Dembiczak
Posts: 7
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 3:05 pm

Re: Help & Manual Not Responding Upon Publish Request

Unread post by Jen Dembiczak »

It's a tad faster, but I didn't populate the project with much content. Could it be content size issues?? That still doesn't explain why it works for another team member here but not me. It is letting me work within the project, it's just taking forever stuck in "Not Responding" when I hit Publish. If I just leave it for about 30 minutes, the next screen where you select what output you want finally appears. This is terribly inconvenient though.
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Tim Green
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Re: Help & Manual Not Responding Upon Publish Request

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Jen,

I've run this by our entire development team and everyone finds this very mysterious. It would make sense if it is only one particular project that might contain specific problems but it is very odd if this is happening with a completely new project with effectively no content at all. If the same project compiles OK on another computer in the same network there must be some factor external to Help+Manual itself on your computer that is causing the slowdown.

For example, you might be running a third-party anti-virus program that is trying to lock down HM's activity for some reason, or there might be some other software on your system that is interfering with what HM is doing. Sometimes you can get effects like this if you have both an external anti-virus and Windows' own Defender anti-virus running at the same time.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
Jen Dembiczak
Posts: 7
Joined: Tue Apr 09, 2019 3:05 pm

Re: Help & Manual Not Responding Upon Publish Request

Unread post by Jen Dembiczak »

ok... i'll report this to my business' Help Desk to see what we can resolve. No luck still so far.
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