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DITA PDF Transformation Fails

Problem

The DITA to PDF transformation fails.

Cause

To generate the PDF output, Oxygen XML Author uses the DITA Open Toolkit. This process sometimes results in errors. For information about some of the most common errors, see DITA PDF Processing Common Errors.

Solution

If your transformation fails, you can detect some of the problems that caused the errors by running the Validate and Check for Completeness action. Depending on the options you select when you run it, this action reports errors such as topics referenced in other topics but not in the DITA map, broken links, and missing external resources.

You can analyze the Results tab of the DITA transformation and search for messages that contain text similar to [fop] [ERROR]. If you encounter this type of error message, edit the transformation scenario you are using and set the clean.temp parameter to no and the retain.topic.fo parameter to yes. Run the transformation, go to the temporary directory of the transformation, open the topic.fo file and go to the line indicated by the error. Depending on the XSL FO context try to find the DITA topic that contains the text that generates the error.

If none of the above methods helps you, go to Help > About > Components > Frameworks and check what version of the DITA Open Toolkit you are using. Copy the whole output from the DITA-OT console output and either report the problem on the DITA User List or send it to support@oxygenxml.com.