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Why Email Is Better Than Phone Support How To Request Technical Support |
How To Request Technical Support When we receive a tech support email, we don’t take it lightly. Neither should you. Please take a few minutes to go through this checklist before you Send... 1. Is the problem discussed in the manual? You may have looked already, but make a final check using the WinHelp version of the manual. Use the Find (full-text search) facility as well as the contents and index. Try a few different keywords. Very often the information you need is really there, just not where you expected to find it. Please look thoroughly. And always use the short and simple troubleshooting process described in Appendix D of the User’s Guide! 2. Is the problem reproducible? Do you get the same results each time you try, or does it vary? If you have machines with other operating system versions available, does the same thing happen on all of them? Does it happen with all of your files, or only some? Can you find something that the problem files have in common, that others do not? Tell us. 3. Look closely at your path and file names. If your path or file name has any characters in it besides letters and numbers, such as spaces or underscores, rename to eliminate them. Spaces in path names cause a great many obscure problems for many programs, including FrameMaker itself; never, ever, use them. 4. Reduce your FrameMaker file to the minimum size that causes the problem, a page or less. We may need to run repeated tests; if they take a few seconds, you will get a reply much sooner than if they take five minutes. Try making a copy of the problem file, then splitting it in half, and see if the problem happens with only one part. If so, repeat the splitting, until you are down to a page or less; you may very well find something questionable in the file in the process. Sometimes after you narrow it down, you can make a small change and get it working. 5. Send us the files needed to reproduce the problem as a .zip attachment to your email. This saves loads of time during analysis, as what you think the problem is, may not be. If we cannot duplicate what you saw happen, we cannot fix it quickly, if at all. Include in the .zip the FrameMaker file, the .ini file involved, the .prj file, and for WinHelp the .hpj you are using. Also include any referenced external graphics; they are often the cause of crashes. Include all output files produced by Mif2Go. Please, put all the files in one .zip, and make sure the .zip is under 5MB so it won’t bounce. 6. Include the file that shows the undesired result, if any, along with a description of the exact spot where the badness happened; what is obviously wrong to you may look normal to us. 7. If the problem is with an HTML file, tell us what browser you used, and which version of it; there is not much standardization between different browsers, and what works fine in one may turn nasty in another. Netscape and Internet Explorer often handle CSS differently, for example. These problems cannot always be fixed, though we may be able to suggest good workarounds. 8. Always describe the hardware and OS version you used. You may have problems with Win98 on a machine with 64MB that will go away with Win2K on a 512MB system. Look at the FrameMaker Help | About FrameMaker... box, and give us the version number you see there (such as: 7.1b023). If you give us complete, accurate information, we will be able to provide you with the excellent technical support that you deserve. We will always do our best to help, but if you do your part thoroughly we’ll be a lot more effective with ours. | ||||
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