[xep-support] Troubleshooting DITA environment and output

[dvint at dvint.com]

I've been trying to troubleshoot some problems within our content and the
resulting FO that is generated by the DITA OT and the various formatting
engines that I have been testing.

Here are the results/issues I've found, question to follow:

- Using the default FOP I have several tables that report problems. What I
have seen are mostly related to a mismatch in the number of columns in the
table and the number of colspecs defined. FOP reports this and indicates
that the auto layout is not supported.

- We switched to a trial of Antenna House and it seems to power through
the table issues and just issues warnings about 40 links that are to
non-DITA types and wants the format attribute specified. These manifest as
warning:
[warning] unresolved internal destination: 'unique_2518_Connect_42_how'
[warning] unresolved internal destination: 'unique_2518_Connect_42_examples'
AH does produce a PDF file that looks complete.

- When I try the same FO file with XEP we seem to get past the table
issues and get the same warnings as AH, but we get near the end and
receive a formatting failure:
  (generate [output-format
pdf][1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]
    [error] formatting failed
    [error] java.lang.NullPointerException

Any idea what would be causing this to fail completely? It has been some
time since I have worked with XEP, but it seems like I'm at the stage
where we are writing out the actual PDF pages. How accurate is the counter
vs where the actual problem might be? I'm looking at the AH output around
pages 25-30 and I'm only finding xrefs that are producing page numbers, so
I don't think I have any of my link warnings in this area (I'll be
checking further on this), so what else should I be searching for? Any
ideas on how to debug this problem?

I'm using the x4u utility at the moment, quoted error text is from the
output window. I don't see any errors in the command window that made the
java call.

This is a 3,177 page document when produced. I had to bump the stack heap
space to 4096m to get it to this point in the process.




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