copy-to fails to update image paths

I have a topic in the directory topics/ that includes two image references (one with a relative path, one with a key). Both images are located in the peer images/ directory:

<ul>
<li>Image with relatve path: <image href="../images/happycat.jpg" alt="yuk"/></li>
<li>Image with key: <image keyref="flag"/></li>
</ul>

In my map, I publish that topic as-is; I also use @copy-to to copy it up a directory, down a directory, and to a peer directory.

My rendered HTML5 output has four copies of the topic (original, copied up, copied to peer, copied down). In all 4 versions, the original relative path ../images/ is used. This is true for both the relative-path version and the keyref version. As a result, the rendered topic is only valid in the original and peer directories. copyimage.zip

[raducoravu]

I first reproduced the initial problem on 2.3.2. The problem could be reproduced in the XHTML outputs, the PDF worked. I updated to the latest 2.3.3 github branch, run gradle. The XHTML output looks fixed, images appear in all HTML topics. The PDF output is broken though:

        map2pdf2:
        [topic-merge] Processing C:\Users\radu_coravu\Desktop\copy-image\temp\pdf\oxygen_dita_temp\P024801.ditamap
        [topic-merge] Processing C:\Users\radu_coravu\Desktop\copy-image\temp\pdf\oxygen_dita_temp\topics\test.dita
        [topic-merge] Failed to parse topics\test.dita: Illegal character in path at index 6: topics\test.dita
        [topic-merge] Error at xsl:element on line 64 of topicmergeImpl.xsl:
        [topic-merge]   XTDE0820: Invalid element name. Invalid QName {}
        [topic-merge]   in built-in template rule

[marknyma]

Regarding the original issue, if the dita file in @href cannot be located (like a missing file etc.) we get a freak “Error: java.lang.NullPointerException” and naturally the transformation fails with no info as to what would be the actual problem.

Easy to reproduce with the copyimage example, just rename the test.dita file to something else.

There should be a more concise error message in this situation.

We are using dita-ot v2.5.4 with the oXygen WebHelp transformation.