Error parsing code in DITA book

[Anna]

Context: I work in a team of 20 and I'm the only one experiencing the following issue.

For certain DITA books, I'm unable to generate the PDF and receive the following error message (in quote box so it's visible):

map2pdf2.genetec:
[pipeline] Failed to parse SSW/R_SSW_ResolvedIssues_SR1.dita: C:\SVN\trunk_Clean\temp-gen-pdf\oxygen_dita_temp\FR\SSW\reference.dtd (The system cannot find the file specified)
[pipeline] Error on line 42 column 564
[pipeline] SXXP0003: Error reported by XML parser: The value of attribute "xtrc" associated with an
[pipeline] element type "keyword" must not contain the '<' character.

BUILD FAILED
C:\DITA-PACKS\DITA-OT-1.7\DITA-OT-1.7\build.xml:53: The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\DITA-PACKS\DITA-OT-1.7\DITA-OT-1.7\build.xml:1299: The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\DITA-PACKS\DITA-OT-1.7\DITA-OT-1.7\build.xml:1316: Failed to run pipeline: Failed to process merged topics: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 42; columnNumber: 564; The value of attribute "xtrc" associated with an element type "keyword" must not contain the '<' character.

It appears that there is white/empty space between some of the tags (such as <li> and <keyword>, for example). Deleting that white/empty space solves the problem and I'm able to generate. HOWEVER this is not a great workaround since it's time-consuming and, quite frankly, tedious.

Any ideas?

[Radu]

Hi Anna,

It looks like that old DITA Open Toolkit (version 1.7) you are using somehow produces invalid XML content in that particular situation. Probably a newer DITA OT engine (2.5.4 or 3.3) would no longer have this problem.
So you should try publishing with a newer publishing engine, see if the problem persists. If it does and you can provide us (support@oxygenxml.com) with a small sample DITA project exemplifying the problem we can take a look at it.

Regards,
Radu