Internal only "newsletter" made in publisher - formatting breaks!

[send2steph]

We have a newsletter that is published weekly that we produce using
Publisher. We post it to our internal newsgroups (link to the network
location), send it via email (as a webpage within the email using the Send
E-mail option in Publisher), and we post it on our developers wiki page
(using wiki markup to post to the file location on the network drive).

So, this newsletter webpage is never on the web - it's always only accessed
from a network drive. The newsletter contains text and images.

For the person making the newsletter and for her immediate co-workers, it
looks fine - whether in publisher or by using any of the links to the file on
the network... for a while.

I don't know why, whether it's someone clicking on it that is using a
different OS, some amount of time, I don't know.

Eventually, none of the images are available, the layout of some of the
table (which may be because the images aren't there) and background colors in
some of the tables are not there. And, it's for everyone - even the author -
after a little while. Again - I don't know if it's some time thing. I don't
know. The physical file itself - the htm file - is not changing in this time.

I've tried using full network paths to things, in various formats (whether
it's just img src="P:..." or file:///P: or just relative paths with just the
/080607_files/ part in there with no path (that's how Publisher initially
writes the html).

It's really frustrating because I change the way the file paths are
referenced and I think I've fixed it, have someone else nearby me pull it up
from the wiki and it looks good, then I have someone else pull it up (who's
been having problems with it and happens to be running Vista) and boom - it's
broken. Then, none of us can see it.

And the physical 080607.htm file has not changed during the time that it
mysteriously became broken.

Any clue as to what is going on here?

 

[Aaron Rykhus [MSFT]]

What version/service pack of Publisher and how are you saving the file? Is
everyone that is editing this file using the same version of Publisher and
the same method of saving?

Did this just start happening recently or has this always been happening?


Best Regards,

Aaron Rykhus, MCP, MCDST
Online Support Engineer
Microsoft Corporation

 

[send2steph]

I played and played and played with this until I finally did something...

I edited the files properties so that it was a read-only file and that fixed
the problem.

This seems really scary to me. Why would opening an htm file in a browser
cause edits to the file (when it's not read only)? As soon as I made the
file read only, the problem stopped. Prior to that, it had always happened
that way and no one could figure it out.

It's not like someone's opening the file in and editor and then saving it
after - they're just browsing to it and it somehow messes up the file.

(I'm at home right now and don't know about what build of Publisher it is, I
can find out tomorrow though.)

 

[Aaron Rykhus [MSFT]]

Nice catch on the Read-Only fix. From strictly a Publisher perspective, I'm
not sure how could have happened other than someone opening the .HTM file
in Publisher and deleting out the pictures which would seem unlikely.

If you can consistently reproduce the problem with any Publisher file (new
and existing) the next logical troubleshooting step would be to see if it
happens with another Office app's HTML, like Word. You could also try
saving a file to another server to see if you can reproduce the problem
from there.

Another tip, since this involving pictures, would be to use Graphics
Manager under the Tools menu in Publisher to analyze the details about the
pictures.




Best Regards,

Aaron Rykhus, MCP, MCDST
Online Support Engineer
Microsoft Corporation