Technical FAQs for "PrizmDoc Viewer"

What file formats does PrizmDoc Viewer currently support?

Please refer to our latest documentation for the most up-to-date list of supported file formats:

• Supported File Formats

For documentation on older versions of PrizmDoc Viewer, please see our documentation archive.

Is it possible to only use PrizmDoc on an internal network? Does the product make attempts to connect to sites that are on the Internet? Does it try to reach Accusoft?

The only cases where PrizmDoc must be connected to the Internet are as follows:

• If you are running the PLU in online mode.
• If your PrizmDoc deployment uses cloud licensing. In this case, PrizmDoc requires Internet access to get to the S3 bucket.

Beyond these cases, PrizmDoc can be installed on an internal network and used normally.

Can PrizmDoc handle password-protected files, such as PDFs or Excel files?
How would a user specify a password for a particular document?

It is possible to specify the password for a password-protected document when creating a viewing session in PrizmDoc. When sending a request to create a viewing session, you’ll use the password field in the request body to specify the password. For example…

POST http://localhost:3000/ViewingSession
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "source": {
        "type": "url",
        "url": "https://www.usability.gov/sites/default/files/creating-wireframes.pdf"
    },
    "password": "hunter2"
}

(Replace "hunter2" with the actual password)

Please note that even if a file needs a password and is not provided one (or is provided one that’s incorrect), the viewing session should still be created successfully. The easiest method to determine whether the password is needed/correct is to make a call to get the page. You can do this by making a GET request to the GetPage route using the viewingSessionId created earlier, like so…

GET pas_base_url/Page/q/0?DocumentID=u{viewingSessionId}

…be sure to replace pas_base_url with the root of your Prizm Application Services (PAS) instance (usually this is http://localhost:3000) and replace {viewingSessionId} with the actual value for viewingSessionId created in the previous step.

The above call will return 200 OK if the page load is successful. If a password is required/incorrect, you should see a return status code 480. There will be additional response headers called accusoft-status-number and accusoft-status-message, which should be 4001 and "Document requires a password", respectively.

You can see the above in greater detail in the product documentation here.

You can use this information to re-create a viewing session with the correct password.

Currently, there is a feature request planned for a potential future release of PrizmDoc to prompt the user for a password if one is required.

PrizmDoc logs have timestamps, what timezone are they in?

PrizmDoc logs are timestamped in GMT, in the ISO 8601 standard.

When I try to install PrizmDoc Server on Windows, my username/password are rejected as incorrect. How can I troubleshoot this?

It’s possible that there is some problem with the account you’re trying to log in under.

First, make sure the server is in the same domain as the username you login with. For example, if you are logging in under abc.com\flastname, ensure that your server is also a part of the abc.com domain.

Second, do a “whoami” from the command prompt – verify the id that comes up is in the local admins group (Control Panel -> All Control Panel Items -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Local Users and Groups -> Groups -> Administrators). You need to be a local admin in order to install the product.

Third, if none of the above work, you can type the password into Notepad and copy from Notepad into the installer. Sometimes the installer has difficulties with text copied directly from web browsers. Copying from Notepad resolves this issue.

If none of the above work, then as a workaround, try creating a new local account: (Settings App -> Accounts -> Other People -> “Add someone else…” -> “I don’t have this person’s sign-in information” -> “Add a user without a Microsoft account”) You can then enter the new credentials you just created into the PrizmDoc installer. Once the services are running, you can change the login information back to the desired administrator account (Services -> Prizm (Double click) -> Log on -> This account). You’ll want to repeat this for all three services (Prizm, Prizm Application Services, and PrizmDemo).

I have an evaluation license for PrizmDoc. Can I evaluate MSO features with this evaluation license?

No, regular PrizmDoc evaluation licenses do not have MSO functionality. They will instead use LibreOffice to convert documents. Contact an Accusoft Support Technician or your Account Representative to discuss evaluating PrizmDoc with MSO enabled.

Is it possible to automatically annotate a document, similar to the Auto-Redaction feature, using PrizmDoc?

An auto-annotation feature isn’t an out-of-the-box feature but with some work, it can be done. This would involve creating a searchTask and using the information from it to programmatically create XML markup that can be used in the MarkupBurner.

To do this you would need to create a searchTask for the pattern you would like to annotate. You can then get the results of the searchTask as JSON which will contain all occurrences of that pattern/search. Each search result will include the selected text, the page on which it occurs, the starting index of the result, and the dimensions and coordinates of the bounding rectangles for that search result.

All this information can be used to construct the markup XML to add the annotations with the markup burner.

Once you have constructed the XML you would post to the MarkupBurner with the XML as the body to burn the document.

When licensing my PrizmDoc server, I get the error “Unable to write licensing information to the properties file.” Why is this happening?

To resolve this issue, please try the following:

1. Re-run the Prizm Licensing Utility as an administrator.

2. The Prizm Licensing Utility is writing to Prizm/prizm-services-config.yml. See whether you have permissions to edit this file.

3. Check whether Prizm/prizm-services-config.yml is locked by another process. If you have it open in some text editing software, PrizmDoc may not be able to write to it.

Additionally, if you have an OEM key, you can just manually enter this key into the file by placing the following at the top:

license.solutionName: ENTER_YOUR_SOLUTION_NAME_HERE

license.key: 2.0…rest_of_the_key_goes_here

I am creating a viewing session from a local document on my server and providing an absolute path “C:\Users\Public\Documents\Accusoft\Common\Images\PdfDemoSample.pdf” as the fileName but I receive a 404 error. What could be the reason for this and how can I fix it?

For security reasons, PAS disallows providing absolute paths for documents that are outside of the directory specified in the documents.path in the pcc.win.yml config file. So trying to provide a path to any file outside of that directory will cause a 404 error.

We recommend that you set documents.path to the directory in which you store your documents. When you create a create a viewing session using a local document, you should set fileName to the relative path to the document from the documents directory.

You can also set fileName to the absolute path to the document if it is contained in the documents directory (specified in pcc.win.yml) if you prefer to use absolute paths.

After applying a new license/evaluation license through the license utility on Linux, the following error appears in the logs:

{"gid":"","name":"OCS","time":"2019-01-3T18:26:39.368Z","pid":36875,"level":50,"tid":36875,"taskid":8,"FATAL ERROR":"MSO feature is active, but 'fidelity.msOfficeCluster.host' and 'fidelity.msOfficeCluster.port' are not configured, going to 'Unhealthy' state"}

What could cause this issue to occur, and how can it be fixed?

As you are running on Linux, the MSO switch on the license assumes that there are additional settings configured:

fidelity.msOfficeCluster.host and fidelity.msOfficeCluster.port

These settings are meant to point to a Windows server which has Microsoft Office 2013 or 2016 installed alongside PrizmDoc with MSO enabled. This is required for MSO functionality to be enabled.

If you wish to use the license with MSO enabled but do not have a separate Windows server, you can do the following to set the PrizmDoc service to run using LibreOffice:

1. Make a backup of /usr/share/prizm/prizm-services-config.yml file.
2. Edit the file in the text editor of your choice and find the following line, fidelity.msOfficeDocumentsRenderer: auto
3. Be sure to remove the hash and leading space in front of the line and then change from auto to libreoffice.
   fidelity.msOfficeDocumentsRenderer: libreoffice
4. Restart the service by running /usr/share/prizm/scripts/pccis.sh restart

Some of our users using Google Chrome have been reporting that PDF document loading and page rendering is extraordinarily slow. This is making the workflow unusable. What could have caused this issue to start occurring?

An issue was discovered in Google Chrome 71 that was causing this issue. The issue was resolved in Google Chrome 72 (released in Jan 2019).

If you are experiencing this PDF loading issue with PrizmDoc, and you are using the Google Chrome browser, please verify that you are using the latest stable version here:
https://www.google.com/chrome/

How can I annotate or redact search results within PrizmDoc? What annotation or redaction types are supported? How can I change the properties of the created marks?

You can annotate or redact search results using the addMarkFromSearchResult() function from ViewerControl. This function creates a new mark of a specific type and adds it to the location where the specified search result is.

The addMarkFromSearchResult() supports mark types: TextSelectionRedaction, HighlightAnnotation, StrikethroughAnnotation and TextHyperlinkAnnotation.

The addMarkFromSearchResult() function takes two arguments: searchResult and markType. The searchResult is the search result that you want to annotate/redact and markType is the type of mark that will be created.

To perform a search and redact the search results, use the following example:

var requestObject = PCCViewer.search('Con');
 var marks = [];
 var mark;
 requestObject.on(PCCViewer.EventType.SearchCompleted, function (event) {
     var searchResults = event.completedSearchResults;
     for (var i = 0; i < searchResults.length; i++) {
         mark = viewer.viewerControl.addMarkFromSearchResult(searchResults[i], PCCViewer.Mark.Type.TextSelectionRedaction);
         marks.push(mark);
     }
 });

To create a different annotation type from a search result you would change the second argument to the different type. For example, if you wanted a textHyperLinkAnnotation you could do the following:

mark = viewer.viewerControl.addMarkFromSearchResult(result, PCCViewer.Mark.Type.TextHyperlinkAnnotation);

Changing the properties of the mark is fairly straightforward. To set the fill color and the URL string in the TextHyperlinkAnnotation, you would add this after creating the mark:

mark.setHref("https://www.accusoft.com");
mark.setFillColor("#FF0000");

More information on mark types and their properties can be found in our documentation here.