It always happens just when you're trying to get something finished off to meet a deadline. You've been compiling your project all day without any problems and then, out of the blue, you get an error message when you hit the build button - and the nightmare begins!

OK, nightmare might be pushing it a bit in this instance, but severe headache is certainly no exageration.

In this case I'm talking about building WebHelp in Flare 2.5.2. The message that appeared out of the blue was:

The error message might lead you to believe that the problem is one of the files you've been working on. Don't be fooled. I tried taking a backup of my entire project directory and then reverting to a previous version from our Subversion repository, saved prior to the error occurring. It didn't solve the problem.

Neither is it something obvious like a temporary file sitting around somewhere. I tried cleaning out Flare's temporary directories. No good.

Don't bother reinstalling Flare. I tried it. This is a stone cold bug and you need to get the fix from MadCap.

Solution

If you are using Flare 2.5.2 and you get the following error message when you build your output:

"Internal error: Cannot create a file when the file already exists."

You need to download a patched DLL:

http://madcap.vo.llnwd.net/o1/flare020-ke5g/B3.CoreKit.zip

and do this:

1. Unzip this file.
   This produces a file called B3.CoreKit.dll.
2. Exit Flare, if it's running.
3. In Windows Explorer, go to C:\Program Files\MadCap Software\MadCap Flare V2.5\Flare.app (assuming that's where you chose to install Flare).
4. Rename the existing B3.CoreKit.dll file in this directory as B3.CoreKit.ORIGINAL.
5. Copy the new B3.CoreKit.dll file to the C:\Program Files\MadCap Software\MadCap Flare V2.5\Flare.app directory.
6. Restart Flare.

Let's see if I can upload that 130KB image using the Performancing add-on for Firefox:

Using Performancing is much more work. You first need to upload the image to the server, then you insert it in the Performancing window, then you publish. Also you only get the image full size. The nice thing about Live Writer is that it does the resizing for you.

But let's see if it works.

I discovered a couple of alternative ways of adding content to your blog today. This post is to test out one of those: Performancing for Firefox (http://performancing.com/firefox). This is a Firefox add-on that gives you an editor right in Firefox (as the lower part of the Firefox window).

Let me just check out some formatting here. No colour, unfortunately, but one of the great things about it is that it allows you to edit existing posts.

What I didn't say in that last post was that my new Help system is created in Flare. The glossary popups I use are much nicer than the ones you get in Flare because you can move them around, copy the text from them, include formatting and images in them, and they just look better:

The great thing about Flare is that it's easy to add stuff like this on. The bad thing about Flare is that - and this feels a bit like a hang over from the bad old RoboHelp days - the way it's been coded assumes the only files in your project are going to be ones put there by Flare and so it does some weird stuff. For example, if you include XML files in your resources, as I do for my home-grown glossary popups, Flare parses and rewrites these in its own particular way and, very annoyingly, removing the CDATA markers around content so that it is parsed by the XML parser rather than being treated literally so that tags can be passed through to the browser. So my original XML:

<glossentry id="delimit">
  <glossterm>
    <![CDATA[
      Delimit
    ]]>
  </glossterm>
  <glossdef>
    <![CDATA[
      To mark the beginning or end of a query term. Terms are delimited by spaces, punctuation marks, wildcards and special characters such as $, <, ~, # etc.
    ]]>
  </glossdef>
</glossentry>

Becomes:

<glossentry id="delimit">
  <glossterm>
    Delimit
  </glossterm>
  <glossdef>
    To mark the beginning or end of a query term. Terms are delimited by spaces, punctuation marks, wildcards and special characters such as $, <, ~, # etc.
  </glossdef>
</glossentry>

Which screws things up if the content contains characters like '&'.

RoboHelp 6 released January 16. You can watch/listen to a recorded eSeminar/webinar on "What's New in RoboHelp 6" at:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=register_no_session&id=797489&loc=en_us

Note: You need to register to see this webinar, but registration is free.

The webinar is hosted by Michael Hu (Senior Product Marketing Manager for RoboHelp and FrameMaker) but revolves around a demo of about 30 minutes by RJ Jacquez (Senior Product Evangelist for RoboHelp and FrameMaker).

From what's shown in the demo it looks like RoboHelp 6 catches up with a lot of the things that went into Flare, like better support for conditional elements and variables. It's not a radical upgrade, but with the teething problems and young-product irritations I've come across in Flare, RoboHelp 6 looks like a good option if you like RoboHelp and have held off buying Flare because you knew a new version of RoboHelp was on its way. The biggest thing Adobe have in their favour is the product set. Most tech authors are using other Adobe products like FrameMaker, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Acrobat and there's the promise that these products will be better integrated in future.

I'm committed to using Flare (because I'm currently using it write WebHelp for a major new software release), but I've also just ordered a copy of RoboHelp 6 for a new member of staff to allow him to work on our existing online help - so I've got a foot in either camp and I've not decided yet which is going to be the best long-term solution.