Only technicians and programmers would run into this.  I did, and fortunately, Dr.Explain helped me fix the problem I created with very little effort.

 

 

 

I had been editing my project on 2 different computers.  The trouble I had with this was that if I would try to generate CHM file on the 2nd computer, the paths for different things like the generated CHM file and the MAP file and a few other things were not right on the 2nd computer, and I would have to go through several trial and error steps before it would generate a CHM file for me on the 2nd computer.

 

Being a programmer, and seeing that the .GUI is an XML file (which is text), and having a very capable text editor, I thought would be "bright" and edit the .GUI file with my programmer's editor in order to simply edit these paths. I THOUGHT all I would have to do is change the string "E:" to "C:".  (I have done this regularly with other types of project files between computers without any problems -- projects for software I am developing.)  I THOUGHT this would make it so that all my paths would be correct and I could simply generate my CHM on my 2nd computer without any problems.  So I tried this, and it APPEARED to work.  Then I did several hours of work on the new file on the 2nd computer, but late in the day, I discovered that when I tried to navigate to one of my pages that had long since been completed (and was not touched all day), the program crashed.  Something happened that was preventing me from displaying that page at all!  Every time I tried, the program crashed.

 

Thinking this through, while I thought it was unlikely, I thought it was possible that I corrupted the .GUI file with my editor.  So I did an an experiment:  I took a prior working copy of the file and made a test copy:

 

test_working.gui

 

Then I did exactly the same edit ("E:" to "C:") and saved it as:

 

test_working_edited.gui

 

Then to really find out whether I corrupted it or not, I took a utility program I use to compare text files and compared them.

 

Here is what I found:

 

Some parts of the .GUI file have a really LONG string of characters in them between line separators (i.e. really long lines -- so long that even my fancy programmer's editor "choked" on it, and every place an "E:" showed up was in one of these really long lines.  My editor actually quietly deleted a space far away from where I was editing!  My programmer's editor has a bug!  Wow!).  Bottom line:  my fancy text editor is supposed to be equipped to deal with really long lines, but it has a bug that corrupted the .GUI file!

 

The lesson I learned out of this is:  don't edit the .GUI file with anything but Dr.Explain!  (Or get the makers of my text editor to fix the bug!)

 

Solution:

 

I reverted back to the file version just before I edited it with my text editor.

 

How was I going to get those several hours of work into my original (uncorrupted) project?  Thankfully, it was in the creation of a whole new set of pages, and ALL of that work was isolated in those new pages.  I hoped (and crossed my fingers) that I could open a copy of the corrupted project (in which I could access the new pages just fine), and copy/paste them into the uncorrupted project.

 

I copied the pages by selecting the ROOT page (under which all the other new pages existed), and selected Copy from the Edit menu, hoping this would copy the entire tree of pages onto the clipboard.  Then I went into the uncorrupted project and selected Edit > Paste.  All the pages arrived intact!!!  The entire tree -- the root page and all of its children and all of their children all came with it!!!  Images, text, special styles, everything!  *wheezing sigh of relief*

 

Then I THOUGHT that I would need to re-index these pages again, since part of that work earlier was adding index (keyword) links to the new pages from existing keyword entries in the index.  Here is where I received a most PLEASANT surprise:  all of keyword links I had carefully created in the other project before I had discovered I had corrupted it, WERE ALSO brought into the destination documented when I selected Edit > Paste!!!

 

Wow!!!

 

Initially, I thought I might have lost an hour of work.  But how long did it actually take me to fix the above problem?  Because Copy/Paste are so powerful between Dr.Explain projects, fixing the above completely -- regaining my lost several hours of work, took me only about 10 minutes.  And most of THAT time was spent discovering that the work I thought I was going to have to do to re-add the keyword links was already done for me by Dr.Explain.  Had I known that in advance, it would have only taken me about 3 minutes.  No exaggeration.

 

Once again, Dr.Explain saved me hours of time!  Boy am I happy!

 

 

 

When keyboard focus is on the Keywords List (which is where you build your index), if you hit the Delete key, it silently deletes whatever keyword had focus (and all of its children!). Normally when you are working in Dr.Explain, this is not dangerous, as you simply hit Ctrl-Z and Undo the deletion.

 

The danger comes when your keyboard focus is on another application, and something (e.g. e-mail arriving, or an alert window pops up) changes keyboard focus back to Dr.Explain's Keyword List without you being aware of it -- while you are typing! This actually did happen to me during my project, and I had just hit the Delete key and then looked up to see what happened, and keyboard focus was on the Keywords List and I had no idea what I just deleted....

 

If this happens there are two options:

 

 

Sound advice: