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Subject:RoboHelp 5.0 - MAJOR STOPPER From:Sass Nielsen <sassn -at- PROTOTYPEINC -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 18 Nov 1997 14:42:10 -0800
When we installed Robo 5.0 we had terrible performance problems. Blue Sky
Tech Support told us it was due to having our docs in a folder on a network
drive. "?." I thought, "you mean to tell me it's unusual for a tech doc.
dept. to keep their projects on a network drive so multiple authors can
access them"? Blue Sky encouraged me to move the project to my hard disk
and use SourceSafe to have each writer check out a document they needed to
work on.
I was skeptical. I copied the project onto my hard drive. Today I changed a
topic title (not the ID or the map #, just one simple word in the topic).
It took 5.0 SO LONG to make the change I went to lunch.
When I returned from lunch I changed another single word in a single topic.
It is still processing the change, 58 minutes later. Blue Sky's response to
this is that every time you change a topic, RoboHelp checks every single
.rtf file to see if the topic is called. This project has about 200
documents. They suggested (yes, it's true) that I reduce the project down
to as few documents as possible, with 200 topics in each document. "But
wait!" I declared. "Each topic is automatically prefaced with the name of
the document. If I do that, I have to either create thousands of new topics
or edit all the topic IDs to reflec the new document names. By the time I
do that, since it takes so long (60 minutes now, and holding) to make a
change to a topic, you'll come out with 5.1 before I'm done."
Indeed, folks, Blue Sky is going to correct this problem in 5.1, they say,
but they cannot say when it will come out. Their only recommendation is
that we do an uninstall and go back to 4.0. Well, I've opened all my files
and they are not backward compatible, of course, so we are in deep doodoo.
Sass Nielsen, Director of Documentation
Prototype Incorporated
sassn -at- prototypeinc -dot- com
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