I ran into an issue where my output job was stuck in Publishing mode and never timed out. Looking at the logs revealed nothing unusual and the console output (running __publish from the command line), stated that the ISHPublDITAOTUtil.vbs was preparing to use the designated batch script to launch the DITA OT plugin, but nothing displays after that.  I had no visibility into what is going on with my content.

With the help of SDL support we deduced that my content was somehow preventing the job from finishing. "You might have an extended hex character in your content". Really, where??  There must be something somewhere on the server that provides more information about what's happening in the background.

Incidentally, I was able to get the output to work by bypassing the __publish.cmd method and produce the output directly from the OT on the server.  Our IT folks didn't like that idea, but I was desperate.  Something is missing in the processing workflow and I'd like to have the means to have this information exposed for troubleshooting purposes.