TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Re: Word, Doc2Help, and an Index From:"Johns, David" <14615johns -at- KCPBLDG05 -dot- BV -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 11 Jul 1995 08:53:00 CDT
I had the same problem with Doc-To-Help's indexing feature, especially when
placing discretionary targets. Through discretionary indexing, Doc-To-Help
runs through the document, prompting you at each instance to see if you want
to place a target there. After each word in the discretionary list has been
indexed, Word attempts to save the document, apparently as a .TMP file.
These .TMP files accumulate and take up a lot of disk space. (The
unexpected and unexplained appearance of .TMP files in Word 6.0 is another
problem altogether that needs to be resolved by Microsoft--as well as the
many memory problems inherent in that memory-intensive program). Anyway, I
contacted WexTech about the indexing problem and they said they're aware of
it. It is an acknowledge bug, and they're working on it.
David Johns
Black & Veatch
----------
From: TECHWR-L
To: Multiple recipients of list TECHWR-L
Subject: Word, Doc2Help, and an Index
Date: Monday, July 10, 1995 5:58PM
Greetings,
I am pretty confused right now. I am trying to crank out the index for a
Word
6 file that a colleague created using Doc-To-Help 1.6. This file is about 70
pages
long, includes graphics, and has about 130 index entries. When initiated, it
starts
to do its thing, but then it completely slows down after 4 or 5 index
entries
have been processed. It then decides that it's tired and I receive that fun
"Word has insufficient memory, you will not be able to undo" error message.
After
a few of these (it takes 2 hours or so), the system then informs me that my
system
is "Out of memory while indexing." Crud. (BTW, I checked my colleague's
work,
and
it appears to me that she has properly entered her index tags. I removed all
but
two tags, and it ran successfully, albeit *very* slowly.)
Has anyone used the Doc-To-Help indexing feature? If so, how long did it
take
you
to produce yours? I have contacted Doc-To-Help, and I will probably receive
an
impersonal fax with suggestions. I'm curious to find out what is considered
the
normal time span for processing an index with this tool.