Not sure if the issue is still relevant for @Tusken_Raider , but writing here in case someone else would run into this thread.
I've recently had to configure the latest and greatest Arbortext Publishing Engine 8.1 for my dev machine and encountered similar issue (could access the web page for Publishing Engine, but couldn't connect to APE from Arbortext Editor client, was getting the "No publishing configuration information is available from the Arbortext Publishing Engine....." when enabling Publishing Engine in Editor)
But there are two points in my story...
1) I was experiencing the same issue with both https and http.
In the end, after resolving the issue with http, I had no problems configuring https.
There are basically just two steps to enable https and I don't see the second one in your list of steps.
a) Point Tomcat to the keystore with the key(s) for your certificate(s).
b) Import the public key / certificate into the Trusted store of the Java used by clients. If you didn't do this, you won't be able to connect to APE and will get exactly this error ('No publishing configuration information....').
This error seem to be pretty generic and appears for any kind of misconfiguration and doesn't help, but "C'est la vie" they say 🙂
2) Regarding configuring https / tls
As I already mentioned, this particular issue for me had nothing to do with HTTPS.
You've written that you "verified that the service is available over 8080 when https is not configured". How have you verified this?
I could access the web page for Publishing Engine (http://somehost:18080/e3) and could pass basic checklist like get the status page (http://somehost:18080/e3/servlet/e3?f=status) and generate a sample document (from the web page).
But I was seeing different APE errors (see below) in different places / logs and was getting error when accessing the config page (http://somehost:18080/e3/servlet/e3?f=status&page=compconfig).
Error '' scanning local configuration.
e3config.exe failed to return any data.
Agent (<>\WinSta0) sensed not first instance and died.
Long story short, I resolved the issue, but unfortunately, can't now say for sure what was the cause.
Normally I’m not happy when I don’t know for sure which particular change in configuration resolved an issue, but since it’s a dev machine and there are too many moving parts there and I couldn’t reproduce the issue on another machine, I don’t think I will investigate further.
