FM 2019: How to validate xml source files in ditamap?

[TechWright]

Hi!

I am trying to publish ditamap as html file, however, it always fails. The publishing log says at the bottom that "Unable to publish. Validate xml source files and retry." How do I do that? I am new to this and I know my predecessor used Framemaker 2015 to work with the same files. Does that create a problem? I have gone through the whole ditamap and saved all the files with Framemaker 2019, but that didn't help. I have applied "Structure > Validate > Entire document > Start validating" for each file. Didn't help. Or then I'm doing something wrong with these procedures.

What should I do/try next?

Thank you for any help or tips!

[Amitojsingh]

Between FM2015 and FM2019, DITA-OT has been upgraded in FM and plans are to upgrade the same for FMNEXT release as well. Not sure if some checks are failing. Maybe you may wanna check if you were earlier using DITA 1.1 and not with FM2019 defaulting to DITA 1.3. If you can, try and share a sample with me and i could have a look at the same as well.

Thanks

Amitoj Singh

Email: amisingh@adobe.com

[TechWright]

Thank you for your quick response!

How do I check which DITA do I have? And by sharing, do you mean send you the ditamap via email? I would have to check that with my company.

[TechWright]

Thank you for your quick response! How do I check which DITA I am using? And by "sharing a sample" do you mean sending the ditamap to you via email? I would have to check that with my company.

[Amitojsingh]

In source code of dita topic, there should be something on the lines of 1.2 or 1.3 on the first 2 or 3 lines (metadata).

[TechWright]

I don't know how to check the source code. I am truly very new to this. However, when I go to DITA options when I have the ditamap open on FM, it says in the Application mappings, that all of the applications are DITA 1.1. How do I update the ditamap to be 1.3?

[Amitojsingh]

Looks like it is DITA 1.1. In this case you will have to open all maps and topics/task/concept and make some of the changes such as change to In FM, you can do this change or in Notepad++ do a find and replace. I would suggest to create a backup before you do. or if you could share some of the errors you are getting, i could take a look. Thanks

[TechWright]

Ok, I opened the xml view of the ditamap and the first xml file it contains. the first lines are:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE map PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA 1.3 Map//EN" "technicalContent/dtd/map.dtd" [

Should I change something from those?

[TechWright]

Actually, all I had to do was go to DITA options > Application mappings and change the mappings to correspond with the used DITA version, which was 1.3. The application mappings were all 1.1. Now the publishing goes through. Thank you so much for all your advice, it would have taken me forever to figure out on my own that dita versions were the problem! 🙂

[TechWright]

Too soon again, that didn't solve it. I went through all the individual xml-files in the ditamap and it seems that I can publish all of them but 9. So perhaps these 9 are the reason why the entire ditamap won't publish. But what to do with these nine files? I cannot seem to find anything odd or exceptional in them in comparison to the ones that do manage to publish.

[TechWright]

Update: some of those 9 files start working (can be published in html5) when I deleted them and re-inserted them into the bitmap. I also noticed that some files which can be published own their own without a problem, didn't show in the htlm5 output view, I deleted and re-inserted them too and now they are included in the output view. Strange things going on with these ditamaps. However, I still have problem with at least 4 of the files and the publishing fails with them.

[TechWright]

Update: Only two of the files are actually non-functioning. The others only have links to them. And those non-functioning ones are in some weird blue/tourqoise highlight colour which is not an indicator of a link at least since they're inside <dl> <dlentry> <dt></dt><dd></dd> </dlentry></dl> tags. Quick and dirty solution is to just delete and re-write everything. However, in case some more complex files have the same problem in the futute, it would be nice to know the real solution.