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Amy Smith reports: <<I have a PageMaker 6.5 document that won't print
because of a link problem. The error I'm getting is "Can't process
publication's links - Internal error: Bad record index." Interestingly, I
also get this error when I first open the file, but if I click 'Continue',
the file opens. >>
I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is that you can
sometimes recover from this problem; see Appendix E at the end (p. 498 in my
copy of the manual) under "To run diagnostics on a publication"--but make a
backup copy of the file first, since if the diagnostics don't work, you can
try again in another way (see next paragraph). The bad news is that this is
usually a sign of file corruption, and you can't always recover from it; PM
is particularly unforgiving about some things that really aren't your fault.
The other thing that might help is heading over to Adobe's site and looking
for the knowledgebase publication "Damaged PageMaker publication
troubleshooting guide" and hope that something there helps you solve your
problem (www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/20c9e.htm). But in the end, you may
have to rebuild the publication from scratch.
It might be worth doing a "Save As" and choosing a new name in the faint
hope that this fixes the problem; it probably won't, but you might get
lucky. Speaking of saving, open the File menu, select Preferences, then
select General. Towards the bottom right of the dialog box, you'll see a
variety of "save" options. Select "Smaller files"; "Faster save" is selected
by default, and though it's not as bad as Word's infamous "Fast save" (aka
"fast save, progressive corruption"), it's likely to cause file corruption
problems in the long run.
fwiw, the problem you reported has bit us hard whenever we inserted (placed)
text into a publication created from a template rather than starting from an
empty template. I know, we should've known better, but sometimes you take
dumb shortcuts when the template is unavailable due to network problems. <g>
Adobe has also officially told us not to work on a network; do you see a
pattern in our work habits here? <g> You can sometimes get away with saving
directly on a network, but you're safer to save on your local hard disk,
then backup the files on the network.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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