Command line error reporting

[DavidLink]

Hi everybody,

I'm compiling a manual in various languages using batch files, Japanese is working great. However for my Chinese version I get the following errors:

[Error] Topic ???????????? does not exist or cannot be read.
[Error] Topic ?????? does not exist or cannot be read.
[Error] Topic ?????????????????????????? does not exist or cannot be read.
[Error] Topic ???????? does not exist or cannot be read.

These errors come out of the log file, I've set my command window up to display Unicode and the question marks are still present.

I think HM5 is reporting the name of the topics it's unhappy with, but the unicode is getting bopped so comes out as question makrs. Is it possible for HM5 to report the error with some more meta information? file name and line number would be nice.

Something like:
[Error] Topic ???????????? in marvin.xml, line: 42 does not exist or cannot be read. means I could go straight there and see that topic was bopped by the translation software or I could inspect the file associated with it.

My Chinese translator has reported that four or five files aren't working with his software, I'm waiting to hear back from him, I'm hoping that these events are related. My next plan is to compare the directories with some batch file work to look for missing or corrupt file names. All of this could be avoided with a wee bit more information in the error report, if it's possible

Thanks guys, keep up the great work!

[Tim Green]

Hi David,

This probably just means that someone has used non-ASCII characters in topic IDs, which is totally verboten. Only Latin ASCII characters are permitted in topic IDs. If you try to use characters from other character sets, accented characters or special characters of any kind except _ and -, you will almost always run into problems.

[DavidLink]

Hi David,

This probably just means that someone has used non-ASCII characters in topic IDs, which is totally verboten. Only Latin ASCII characters are permitted in topic IDs. If you try to use characters from other character sets, accented characters or special characters of any kind except _ and -, you will almost always run into problems.

Hi Tim, thanks for the fast reply.

Given the following:

[Error] Topic ???????? does not exist or cannot be read.

How can I find which topic IDs contain a non-ASCII character?

[Tim Green]

How can I find which topic IDs contain a non-ASCII character?

Just select the Topic Options tab below the main editor window. You can see and edit the topic IDs directly there. To see all the topics in your project so that you can locate the affected ones directly just generate a report with the Project Report tool in the Project tab. You can see the IDs directly and there are live links to the topics so that you can click on them to edit them directly.