What do I do when I have publishing problems?

FAQs

Like any complex process, sometimes things don't always work perfectly. Most of the time, you can walk away from a publishing job, and when you come back, it will be done with no problems. Here are a few tips and tricks to try if you do encounter problems while publishing.

In the basic publishing process, you submit a job for publishing from the Contribute publishing pane, and the book moves through the following publishing processes:

  • Pending: The job has not yet found a publishing server to connect to and start the publishing process. This is rarely seen, because publishing jobs generally move past the Pending stage so quickly that you don’t even see it.
  • Queued: The book is in a publishing server's queue and will start when the server is available.
  • Publishing: The point in which the book actively starts publishing on one of the publishing servers. After publishing, the book gets a publishing status of completed, cancelled, or republish.

Pending

If you submit a publishing job for any output and it sits in Pending for more than 10 minutes, log a support ticket. The job likely won’t be triggered on the publishing servers because something is causing it to get stuck. Do not hit cancel and republish, because this just causes another book to take up space on the publishing server. Author-it needs to recycle the publishing service when this happens for a particular data center. Each publishing server is completely independent of the other, so just because your publishing job is stuck in pending on one server, it doesn't mean the other servers are affected.

Canceled

If your publishing job ends up with a Canceled status, go into Files and look in the root folder for the publishing profile you used. That’s where the partial log file will live that contains the error you need. The view log in Contribute only shows you the log for the last successful job, which won't give you the detail you need.

If your book isn’t publishing the latest updated content:

This happens occassionally across all data centers with no consistent causes. Here are some things you can try:

If you publish a book that has had a minor change, for example to the properties of the book, when you republish that minor change has not been recognized, therefore the previous publishing folder hasn’t been deleted, and publishing started anew. Instead, the service thinks no change has happened, and it therefore produces a cached copy of the previously built output.

To make sure that you receive the most recent edition of your book, sign in to Files and manually delete the existing publishing folder for that book. Then republish the book from Author or Contribute. Incorporate this into a process by deleting the book's publishing folder each time you publish. This ensures that the latest version of your book is always the one being published.

Never rename your root publishing folder. The documents and publishing folders must always remain with their default name, or the system won't have any published output.

Error during publishing

Sometimes historically imported books might contain an empty space at the end of the book description. This causes a break in the publishing path, resulting in no output. The log file displays the following error: Error during publishing.

Note: Author-it won't allow you to save a book that contains an empty space at the end of the description. Historically imported books might still contain an empty space at the end of the description that is invisible to the untrained eye.

Error during publishing for other reasons

You may also see a job fail to publish with the error : Error during publishing for other reasons. The full error doesn't always display in the regular publishing logs, only on the publishing server logs available to the Author-it infrastructure team . If you've made sure there is no empty space in the description name already, log a ticket with Tech Support. They will provide the steps needed to capture what publishing server you’re connected to, in order to retrieve the error and instruct you on how to correct it.

Republishing

If you are publishing a book to an output, and try to republish it while it's still in progress, the previous publishing attempt will be terminated in order for the new one to start.

You should receive an email notification advising when a publishing job is complete. If you do not receive that notification, check your email address in the Author-it Cloud portal. If that is correct, then check the status of the job in the Contribute publishing pane. It it doesn’t look to have even started publishing, check back in Author for any variant or publishing prompts that are awaiting action before Author-it can send the publishing job to a server.

Publishing to Word

If you’re publishing to Microsoft Word and it’s taking longer to publish than normal, check the word template that you’re using to publish. Author-it supports the .dot format, not the .dotx format. Author-it Cloud doesn't support using macros, so any macros in your template hang the publishing job/server. Files won't prevent you from uploading .dotm templates, so make sure you use .dot file templates.

Error during publishing

If you click the Download button from either the email notification or the Contribute Publishing pane, and you receive Error during publishing, check the length of your filename. Microsoft limits file path length to 265 characters. The file path that the system uses to get your document to the publishing folder in Files is partially hidden, so knowing the number of characters used in your file path isn't easy. Keep your book name and publishing profile name as short as possible because these form part of the publishing path along with the date and time stamp. When you click Download, it tries to zip these files in the background, which isn't possible when you exceed the maximum of 256 characters.

You can always collect your output from Files, regardless of the file path length.