FrameMaker 10 Crashes Regularly, is unstructured

[Eargle, Lore]

I, too, have experienced regular, random (unstructured) FrameMaker 10 crashes on Windows XP. In fact last week, as I was hurrying to meet a last-minute request for a documentation update, FM10 crashed every time I tried to generate the TOC, LOF, and LOT. I tried everything I could think of and some strategies I found through searching the Internet. These included removing all the files then adding them back one by one after creating a new TOC, keeping all of the files in the book then removing them one by one, creating a new book and doing both of the previous tasks, washing the files with MIF and redoing all of these tasks, etc.

I was able to create a deliverable by creating a PDF of only the chapter files and then creating a PDF of an earlier version of the TOC and editing it in Acrobat. Unfortunately, the figure numbers restarted with each file and I didn't have the time to renumber them all so it went to QA that way. I will fix it before UAT. I ported everything to Word. Thank goodness I was only dealing with 65 pages and not 3000.

At this point my supervisor is asking me to give up on FrameMaker and stick with Word. I have seriously considering just reverting back to my copy of FM8.

Lore

Lore Eargle
Senior Technical Writer
Engineering SharePoint Site Collection Manager


Message: 5
Date: Wed, 07 Aug 2013 09:49:03 -0400
From: Alan Houser <arh at groupwellesley.com<mailto:arh at groupwellesley.com>>
To: Joseph Lorenzini <jaloren at gmail.com<mailto:jaloren at gmail.com>>
Cc: FrameMaker Forum <framers at lists.frameusers.com<mailto:framers at lists.frameusers.com>>
Subject: Re: FrameMaker 10 Crashes Regularly, is unstructured
        FrameMaker 11   more stable
Message-ID: <5202504F.5020906 at groupwellesley.com<mailto:5202504F.5020906 at groupwellesley.com>>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

It's very difficult to say whether your experience will improve with FrameMaker 11. I find FrameMaker 11 to be less temperamental than FrameMaker 10, but it's far from crash-free. Try the 30-day trial version of FrameMaker 11. You should know pretty quickly whether FM11 is more stable in your environment.

Do send your crash logs to Adobe. Crashes with a non-obvious cause (to
you) may be fixable by the FrameMaker development team.

-Alan

On 8/6/13 12:25 PM, Joseph Lorenzini wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have been using FM 10 for about 2 years. It seems like FrameMaker
> will randomly crash at least once a day on me. And I do mean crash ---
> get the infamous fatal exception dialog box and then FrameMaker goes
> kaput. In response to the inevitable debug questions:
>
> -yes i have done a mif wash
> -no this doesn't happen with a particular book or framemaker file. It
> happens randomly no matter what book or file i am in and i have over
> 3,000 pages of documentation.
> -yes, these files have existed since FM 9 -- not sure why that version
> should make a difference -there is no conditional text in any of the
> files. I do use text insets and variables.
> -no the crash doesn't seem to happen when i do a particular thing. The
> only common thing that occurs is that i use hot keys a lot. That said,
> I use hot keys a lot and most of the time the crash does not happen.
> -no i am not on a network share. All files are local.
> -Yes, FM 10 is fully patched.
>
> In any event, debugging why this crash is happening would be
> non-trivial and even if i did figure out why its happenings, there's
> no guarantee that i'd able to find a fix. Adobe certainly isn't going
> to provide one.
>
> Consequently, I am wondering if people have noticed whether FM 11 is
> significantly more stable.Since I am in unstructured, there wasn't a
> compelling reason for me to upgrade. However, i'll consider doing it,
> if it will reduce or eliminate the frequency of crahses on framemaker.
>
> Thanks,
> Joseph Lorenzini
>




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