Troubleshooting tips: Generating Word output

This may also be relevant to PDF, although I haven't tried yet.

If you get an error generating a Word doc, or you open the doc and there's no content except (broken) front and back matter, you might need to check how the condition tags are applied in your topics. 

There was no useful information in the log, but by a process of elimination I found that topics have whacky condition tag placement.

One example was the exclude condition being applied to the individual cells of the table, rather than excluding the entire table.

<table class="SimpleGridNoShading" style="border-spacing:0px;">
    <colgroup>
      <col style="width: 30%;" />
      <col style="width: 70%;" />
    </colgroup>
    <tbody>
      <tr class="t1Row" style="">
        <td data-condition="Others:Exclude" style="border-spacing:0px;width: 30%;"> </td>
        <td data-condition="Others:Exclude" style="border-spacing:0px;width: 70%;"><br />
          
        </td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>

Removing and reapplying so the entire table allowed this topic to generate in this case:

<table class="SimpleGridNoShading" data-condition="Others:Exclude" style="border-spacing:0px;">
    <colgroup>
      <col style="width: 30%;" />
      <col style="width: 70%;" />
    </colgroup>
    <tbody>
      <tr class="t1Row" style="">
        <td style="border-spacing:0px;width: 30%;"> </td>
        <td style="border-spacing:0px;width: 70%;"><br />
          
        </td>
      </tr>
    </tbody>
  </table>

(Don't at me about an empty table conditioned out. There's a reason for this admittedly unusual scenario.)

Now to figure out why all the other topics won't generate. 🙂