How to Remove Links from Terms

Your topics might contain multiple references to the same <term>. These terms can further be explained in the glossary. In this case, you may want to only keep the first occurrence of this term to be a link to the glossary and display the other terms as text.

To add this functionality, use an Oxygen Publishing Template and follow these steps:

If you have not already created a Publishing Template, you need to create one. For details, see How to Create a Publishing Template.
Link the folder associated with the publishing template to your current project in the Project Explorer view.
Using the Project Explorer view, create an xslt folder inside the project root folder.

In the newly created folder, create an XSL file (for example, named merged2html5Extension.xsl) with the following content:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  exclude-result-prefixes="xs"
  version="3.0">
  
  <xsl:template match="*[contains(@class, ' topic/term ')]" name="topic.term">
    <!-- Save the current @href value -->
    <xsl:variable name="current-href" select="@href"/>
    <!-- Get the closest parent topic -->
    <xsl:variable name="closest-parent"
      select="ancestor::*[contains(@class, ' topic/topic ')][1]"/>
    <!-- Get the first <term> having the same href -->
    <xsl:variable name="first-term-with-same-href" select="($closest-parent//
      *[contains(@class, ' topic/term ')][@href=$current-href])[1]"/>
    
    <!-- Call the HTML5 default template -->
    <xsl:variable name="result">
      <xsl:next-match/>
    </xsl:variable>
    
    <!-- Call the copy template that will remove the links -->
    <xsl:apply-templates select="$result" mode="remove-extra-links">
      <xsl:with-param name="is-first-term-with-same-href"
        select="generate-id(.) = generate-id($first-term-with-same-href)" tunnel="yes"/>
    </xsl:apply-templates>
  </xsl:template>
  
  <xsl:template match="node() | @*" mode="remove-extra-links">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node() | @*" mode="#current"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
  
  <xsl:template match="a" mode="remove-extra-links">
    <xsl:param name="is-first-term-with-same-href" tunnel="yes"/>
    <xsl:choose>
      <!-- Process the first term as a link -->
      <xsl:when test="$is-first-term-with-same-href">
        <xsl:next-match/>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <!-- Process the other terms as text -->
        <xsl:copy-of select="child::*"/>
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:template>  
  
</xsl:stylesheet>

Open the template descriptor file associated with your publishing template (the .opt file) and set the XSLT stylesheet created in the previous step with the com.oxygenxml.pdf.css.xsl.merged2html5 XSLT extension point:

<publishing-template>
  ...
  <pdf>
    ...        
    <xslt>
      <extension
        id="com.oxygenxml.pdf.css.xsl.merged2html5"
        file="xslt/merged2html5Extension.xsl"/>
    </xslt>

Edit the DITA Map PDF - based on HTML5 & CSS transformation scenario.
In the Templates tab, click the Choose Custom Publishing Template link and select your template.
Click OK to save the changes and run the transformation scenario.