Leaving out Topics that are commented out in the Map

[VladimirMarenus]

Good morning!

My company is considering switching from XMLMind to Oxygen, but we've got a few hangups - one of which is that I can't seem to comment out a topic on the map and have it actually be removed when generating a PDF. After some frustrated Googling, I think this is because there are other topics which link to it, or have a conref to a paragraph in the file.

In XMLMind, this is handled for links by making them dead (unclickable), and conrefs either disappear or show a raw conref link. Either of these is acceptable to me, since I'm disabling the content for a reason. What isn't so great is Oxygen refusing to build the entire PDF because there's an error with a topic that I've commented-out (because it has the error in the first place...).

Is there a setting or switch that will force Oxygen to ignore references to something that is commented out in the map? Or at the very least, not fail to generate an entire 200 page guide because three of those pages link to a resource that isn't there? Thank you for your time!

[Radu]

Dear Vladimir,

From what I remember XMLMind uses it's own publishing engine to produce output from DITA content.
Oxygen comes bundled with the open source DITA Open Toolkit publishing engine:

http://www.dita-ot.org/

So as the two publishing engines are different, you will get differences in behavior.
Indeed the DITA OT publishing engine which comes with Oxygen may sometimes fail to build the PDF if there are broken links to various resources. This cannot be controlled via a parameter. If you can give me a precise example (maybe a small DITA project with a map and couple of topics exhibiting this problem) we could try to look into this, see if the publishing can be more more robust.

Regards,
Radu