Technical FAQs

I am a PrizmDoc Cloud customer and need to do content conversion with PrizmDoc. Do I have to do anything special to make it work?

Yes, in order to do content conversion as a PrizmDoc Cloud customer, there are a few things you need to do:

1. Most of the information regarding how to use our content conversion service can be found here, including the requests that can be made to it.
2. The URL the requests need to go to is api.accusoft.com, so you will need to make sure the requests for content conversion are going there.
3. You also need to add a header to the requests as follows: acs-api-key: yourapikey.

Doing these three things will allow you to use content conversion as a PrizmDoc Cloud customer.

We are using PrizmDoc and may be adding more end users, so we wanted to verify whether there is a limit to the number of viewing sessions that can be active at one time.

PrizmDoc does not specifically limit the number of viewing sessions that can be active at any given time. However, when opening a viewing session with a document, a conversion does take place. The number of conversions that can be handled simultaneously is based on the hardware constraints of your server.

Various factors, such as the size of documents, the number of conversions, and the hardware being utilized may impact the performance of your PrizmDoc server.

We provide server sizing and performance documentation that is designed to provide guidance and approximate server size based on the number of conversions you plan to do per minute.

Please refer to our documentation page:

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#prizmdoc-server-sizing-servers.html

Why do the fonts in my document look different when rendered in PrizmDoc?

There are times when a document was created on a machine where a user installed a non-standard font (e.g., Maestro-Regular). When the document is viewed on another system, without that font installed, the text will look different.

PrizmDoc uses the fonts installed on the server where it is running when converting the document. If the document has a non-standard font, and the font is not installed on the server where PrizmDoc is running, then it will render the document with a default font.

To fix the issue, you need to install the font onto the PrizmDoc server that converted the document. The procedure below outlines how to install the font on a Windows server. You will need to ensure that you are logged in as the same UserId that the Prizm Service is using.

1. Identify the name of the font that needs to be installed and download the font file associated with that font. The font file name will typically be in the format of fontname.ttf.
2. Copy the .ttf file to the server running PrizmDoc.
3. On the server, right-click the .ttf file and select Install from the menu.
4. Stop all of the Prizm services.
5. Clear all folders under \Prizm\Cache – this will clear the previously rendered files that had the wrong font rendered.
6. Reboot the server and attempt to open the document again.

With PrizmDoc Viewer (Self-Hosted), you need to purchase specific licenses to include certain functionality such as OCR, MSO, etc. With this in mind, are all features of PrizmDoc Cloud included with transaction and subscription purchases?

All features that PrizmDoc Cloud has to offer are available with either transaction or subscription purchases.

How can I make significant changes to the UI of a PrizmDoc sample?

While jQuery can be used to make some small changes to the samples UI, it does not always make sense to make your changes programmatically on the front-end.

In this case, you will want to make your UI changes to the HTML templates used to compile the template that is passed in during viewer initialization.

To make changes and recompile the templates, you can utilize the following GitHub repository:

https://github.com/Accusoft/prizmdoc-viewer

For reporting purposes, we want to rename the markup layer JSON files to help identify which tenant made the markup. For example:

c1fea5868607402c1b664272e5b82aeb7fff7390_0_0hg91gTqSCeg_P9B2Ko7BaH-YxkaazjH.json

rename to:

accusoft_c1fea5868607402c1b664272e5b82aeb7fff7390_0_0hg91gTqSCeg_P9B2Ko7BaH-YxkaazjH.json.

Is this possible?

The actual filename for an annotation .json file contains an encrypted value of the file path and document name. This is what is used to associate the JSON markup layer file with the document.

If you make changes to the first part of the file, PrizmDoc will no longer be able to associate those markups to the actual file.

As a alternative, you can set up a separate PAS instance for each tenant, which will provide a different markup layer for each tenant.

Or you can programmatically handle the markups and store them specifically for each tenant. The following articles outline our Markup JSON specifications:

• PrizmDoc Markup JSON specification:
  https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#markup-json-specification.html
• Use the JSON Markup Schema: https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#marks-json-schema-usage.html

What’s the difference between a Viewing Session and a Viewing Package?

Viewing sessions require source information for the document that you want to view. There are 3 types of sources to choose from: File, URL, and viewing package.

A viewing package is a file you want to view that is stored in its already “converted state”, which we call “pre-conversion”. This is different than a file or URL because these sources are converted and set in a temporary cache folder for use until the cache is cleared out.

Viewing package information can be set to never expire which is useful if you have documents that will be viewed over and over again by many clients. This allows the server not to have to convert the file every time and increases performance.

When using Content Conversion Services, what are the supported input formats that it takes for conversion?

When using Content Conversion Services, you can input any image and document source type that PrizmDoc supports.

Here’s a link to the Content Conversion Services API for more information.

What features does PAS provide that I don’t get from exclusively using the backend?

The following features are provided through PAS:

• Viewing Packages
• Annotation storage/retrieval
• Form Definition storage/retrieval
• Simplified API to communicate with the backend
• Affinity token management (clustered mode)

It is also important to note that all new feature development will involve PAS.

Features not offered through PAS include:

• Content Conversion output to anything other than PDF.

In some cases, when the Server Licensing Utility (SLU) is run, it may return an error similar to the following:

"Server License Utility – Auto register failed

Failed to auto-register. Extra code
#0100-20(RCN=Accusoft.ULF.LicenseService.GenerateLicenseKey,
RC=-56, REC=428). Contact Accusoft support. Error #1"

If, on the other hand, you manually register, you might see a message such as this:

An error has occurred: object (Accusoft.ULF.LicenseService.GenerateLicenseKey), value1 (-56), value2 (429)

What could be the cause?

A possible cause for this error is if you have a license with an expiration date and you have not specified the Access Key in the field on the SLU main window. Since these particular keys expire, our licensing needs to know which specific Access Key to use to differentiate it from any other licenses you may have with different expiration dates or OEM licenses. So, supplying the Access Key will point the license utility to the specific license in the license pool, and should resolve this error.

In PrizmDoc Viewer, when viewing Excel documents that have pictures on certain spreadsheets within that document, the pictures are not displayed.

This appears to happen only if PrizmDoc has the Microsoft Office Conversion (MSO) feature enabled. This issue does not occur if PrizmDoc is using LibreOffice.

Why is this happening?

The issue is related to an Excel “Page Setup” option called “Black and white”. The option is located in Excel under File, Print, Page Setup and is only respected when PrizmDoc has the MSO feature enabled.

When using LibreOffice, this setting does not exist and is ignored, which is why you can see the pictures.

By default, this option is disabled in Excel, so that specific option would have to be manually set by the creator of the document.

As a workaround, ensure that the “Page Setup” option for “Black and white” is not checked on any spreadsheets in an Excel document that has pictures.

Why am I receiving a 500 error when making a Viewing Session PUT request?

This issue can occur if you forget to prefix the {viewingSessionId} portion of the URL with u, or if you simply request an invalid {viewingSessionId} in the call.

For example, the PUT call should look like the following:

PUT /ViewingSession/u{viewingSessionId}/SourceFile

For more information on syntax and other API calls related to Viewing sessions, please see:

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#pas-viewing-sessions.html