Technical FAQs for "PrizmDoc"

Question

Why are the fonts in my CAD files showing up garbled/unrecognizable/not as expected?

Answer

Some CAD/DWG files may include fonts that are not included in PrizmDoc Viewer’s default font set. PrizmDoc will choose the most appropriate substitute font to use in its place. The substitution process isn’t always perfect, and as a result, you will see garbled/unrecognizable characters in the Viewer.

In order to provide additional .SHX fonts for PrizmDoc to pull from, you can copy the necessary .SHX font files into the cad-fonts folder, located at:

Windows: ‪C:\Prizm\modules\cad-fonts
Linux: /usr/share/prizm/modules/cad-fonts

Alternatively, if you want to use fonts from that are located in a different directory, you can add the environment variable, ACAD, to explicitly specify the filepath of these fonts. his variable can be added under System Properties > Advanced > Environment Variables > System Variables > New... > ACAD. For the variable’s Value, specify a folder path that contains additional CAD font files for PrizmDoc to pull from.

* It is important to note that the Linux filesystem is case-senstive, so when adding custom CAD fonts on Linux, make sure that the fonts are named with case-sensitivity in mind. If you still see unexpected output after adding the fonts to the cad-fonts folder, try renaming the fonts to all lowercase.

** Note that the cad-fonts folder was added in PrizmDoc 13.20, so to add custom cad fonts on earlier versions of Prizm, use the environmental variable approach.

Question

When viewing documents within the PrizmDoc Viewer using a particular browser, we are seeing garbage text. Viewing the same document with other browsers shows the text properly. What could be causing this to occur?

Answer

There are two possible causes for this in Internet Explorer 11 and you can check the settings below to potentially fix the issue:

In Internet Explorer 11 settings, ensure the Font Download option is enabled:

  1. Click on Internet Options.
  2. Select the Security Tab.
  3. Under Local Intranet zone, select Custom Level.
  4. Under Downloads, set Font download to Enabled.

Disable the “Turn off Data URI” support setting:

  1. Click Start, type gpedit.msc in the Start Search box, and then press Enter.
  2. In the navigation pane of the Local Group Policy Editor window, expand Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Security Features.
  3. In the right pane, double-click Turn Off Data URI support.
  4. Select Disable, click Apply, and then click OK.
  5. Go back to the navigation pane of the Local Group Policy Editor window, expand User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Security Features.
  6. Repeat steps 3 and step 4 above.

In Internet Explorer 11 settings, ensure Ignore font styles specified in webpages is not checked.

  1. Click on Internet Options.
  2. Select the General Tab.
  3. Click on Accessibility button.
  4. Un-check Ignore font styles specified in webpages.

In Chrome this is a bug that was found about 3 years ago and fixed in Chrome Canary, but not in Chrome Stable at the time:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chrome/rpmz56gnFKc/nPLtsbYZBwAJ

This may be why Chrome is having problems. Consider either updating Chrome Stable to the latest version or testing in Chrome Canary to see if that fixes the garbage character issues with that browser.


In Mozilla Firefox there is a setting you can enable which could resolve this problem in that browser:

  1. Go to Options/Preferences > General: Fonts & Colors > Advanced and select Allow pages to choose their own fonts (instead of My selections above).
Question

With PrizmDoc, how can I hide a predefined search if there are no results?

Answer

The predefined search option does not support that functionality, but you can instead perform a server-side search, and then activate the search panel if there are results to show:

var viewer;
var viewingSessionId = <%= viewingSessionId %>;

var fixedSearchTerm = "the";
var pasUrl = "/pas";

var viewerReady = false;
var searchReady = false;
var searchDisplayed = false;

function displaySearchIfNeeded() {
    // The search is only displayed once the viewer is ready, and once our preliminary server-side search comes back positive.
    if (viewerReady && searchReady && !searchDisplayed) {
        searchDisplayed = true;

        $("[data-pcc-search=\"input\"]").val(fixedSearchTerm);
        $("[data-pcc-search=\"submit\"]").click();
    }
}

function sendSearchPost() {
    $.ajax({
        "method": "POST",
        "url": pasUrl + "/v2/viewingSessions/" + viewingSessionId + "/searchTasks",
        "data": JSON.stringify({
            "input": {
                "searchTerms": [
                    {
                        "type": "simple",
                        "pattern": fixedSearchTerm,
                        "caseSensitive": false,
                        "termId": "0"
                    }
                ]
            }
        }),
        "contentType": "application/json",
        "success": function(response) {
            $.ajax({
                "url": pasUrl + "/v2/searchTasks/" + response["processId"] + "/results?limit=1",
                "success": function(response) {
                    if (response.results.length !== 0) {
                        searchReady = true;

                        displaySearchIfNeeded();
                    }
                },
            });
        },
        "error": function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {
            if (jqXHR.status === 480) {
                setTimeout(sendSearchPost, 2000);
            }
        }
    });
};

setTimeout(sendSearchPost, 500);

$(document).ready(function() {
    // Since we are no longer restricted to a predefined search, we can load the viewer ASAP.
    viewer = $("#viewer").pccViewer({
        "documentID": viewingSessionId,
        "imageHandlerUrl": "/pas",
        "language": viewerCustomizations.languages["en-US"],
        "template": viewerCustomizations.template,
        "icons": viewerCustomizations.icons
    });

    viewer.viewerControl.on("ViewerReady", function(event) {
        viewerReady = true;

        displaySearchIfNeeded();
    });
});
Question

When viewing .csv files in PrizmDoc Viewer, the dates in the CSV file are in UK format (DD/MM/YYYY). However, if the DD is lower than 13 it is converted to US date format (MM/DD/YYYY).

Answer

Workaround:

The suggested workaround is to use Excel files instead of CSV to avoid this situation. Excel file format stores date/time format in the file.

Issue:

This is a bug in the MS Excel COM Interop that is being used by the product (MsOfficeConverter). Here is the related Excel bug: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/82248560-dabd-4c90-b1e2-793b2f32b257/excel-bug-handling-dates-in-csv-files-using-microsoftofficeinteropexcel?forum=exceldev

Problem description:

When using MS Excel Interop to open CSV files, all date/times there are being interpreted with “en-US” locale, regardless of actual system locale. Here is the description from the bug link above:

Excel interpreting dates when its reads csv files via .NET Interop. It is not a excel formatting issue per say. When excel accesses information such as dates (which are stored as numbers in memory to support arithmetic operations) from text files, it has to convert the date from textual representation (within the csv file, such as 2012-09-12) to the equivalent number in Excel memory (e.g. 41164 which represents 2012-09-12). When we use Interop to access this number in memory, many are interpreted incorrectly – swapping days with months and vice versa. This is a bug, as Excel is not abiding by the system culture on interpreting local date formats.

Question

When looking at the configuration files for both PAS (pcc.win.yml, pcc.nix.yml) and PrizmDoc Server (prizm-services-config.yml), there appear to be similar settings for Viewing Session timeouts: defaults.viewingSessionTimeout (PAS) and viewing.sessionLifetime (Server). What is the difference between the two?

Answer

The difference is as follows:

PAS

defaults.viewingSessionTimeout

This setting is used when the viewing session POST requests use source.type="viewingPackage".

Prizm Server

viewing.sessionLifetime

This setting is used for all other viewing session POST requests.

Question

When loading PDF documents into PrizmDoc that contain embedded highlights, rather than appearing translucent, the highlights are appearing opaque and are covering the underlying text. Why is this happening?

Answer

Prior to version 13.4 of PrizmDoc, this was occurring due to limitations in web browsers. The SVG attribute comp-op="multiply" was not widely supported in modern browsers.

With PrizmDoc version 13.4, the way highlights were rendered was changed to resolve this issue.

Question

After searching a document, an error icon appears in the search results panel. Clicking on it displays the following error message: “x page(s) cannot be searched.” Why does this occur and how can I find out which specific pages couldn’t be searched?

Answer

When the PrizmDoc Viewer text-service cannot find any text for a given page in the document, it provides an array of all the pages without text in the response from searchTask results.

In short, the document is fine and simply contains pages without text. If you look at the pagesWithoutText array contained within the response data from searchTasks, you’ll see something like this:

[0, 1, 7, 17, 43, 45, 65, 67, 77, 79,…]

The values reported are pages that do not contain any text but instead are either blank or contain an image. This data can then be used to inform the user of how many pages are not searchable.

Question

Currently we are using PAS for viewing packages and it is pointed to our Accusoft Cloud subscription API key. PAS is installed locally and we store the viewing package artifacts in our S3 bucket. We are using 600 GB of storage on S3 for the viewing package artifacts we already have converted.

We would like to start using Accusoft’s Cloud PAS API to create viewing packages and no longer wish to host our own PAS and have the following questions:

  1. Is there a way we can migrate our current artifacts from our S3 bucket to Accusoft’s S3 bucket?
  2. Is there an additional charge for storing the artifacts at Accusoft?
  3. Is there a way to point the Cloud PAS to our existing S3 bucket?
Answer

Q: Is there a way we can migrate our current artifacts from our S3 bucket to Accusoft’s S3 bucket?

A: We do not currently offer an API for directly importing your existing viewing packages. However, you can re-create your viewing packages in PrizmDoc Cloud using the original source document.

Q: Is there an additional charge for storing the artifacts at Accusoft?

A: At this time there is no additional charge. However, this is
subject to change.

Q: Is there a way to point the Cloud PAS to our existing S3 bucket?

A: There is currently no setting available to configure your PrizmDoc Cloud account to use an S3 bucket which you own. If you use PrizmDoc Cloud, the storage is managed by Accusoft. If you need to own and manage the storage yourself, you’ll want to use your own Self-Hosted PAS.

Question

I have just installed PrizmDoc to my Windows server. When checking the status using http://localhost:18681/admin, the service is showing in a starting phase and ms-office-conversion-service is showing a clock icon, but it never starts.

What are some reasons as to why this might occur?

Answer

This can happen if your PrizmDoc license has the MSO feature enabled and you do not have Microsoft Office 2013 or 2016 installed, or Office 2013 or 2016 is not activated.

To fix this issue you can either:

  • Install Microsoft Office 2013 or 2016, activate it, and reboot the server.

Or:

  • Switch PrizmDoc to use LibreOffice until you are able to install Microsoft Office by modifying C:\Prizm\prizm-serivices-config.yml and updating the line:
    #fidelity.msOfficeDocumentsRenderer: auto
    

    to:

    fidelity.msOfficeDocumentsRenderer: libreoffice
    
Question

I changed the value of viewingSessionTimeout

Answer

If you are using Windows, the value that you are looking to modify is the viewing.sessionLifetime in the central config file prizm-services-config.yml located in the root of the PrizmDoc installation directory (C:\Prizm on Windows, /usr/share/prizm on Linux).

Make sure it is uncommented and without any leading whitespace.

Additionally, please make sure the viewing.cacheLifetime is greater than the viewing.sessionLifetime value.

More information can be found here.

You must restart the PrizmDoc service in order for your changes to take affect.

Question

Where does PrizmDoc store E-Signatures and how can I retrieve them?

Answer

PrizmDoc does not store E-Signatures on the server. However, PrizmDoc does store them in the browser’s local storage so that an end user can use the same signature across multiple documents and multiple sessions within the same browser.

In the Viewer Sample, end users are able to save their individual signatures for their own record using the “Download Signature” button under the Manage E-Signatures menu. This will download a plain-text JSON file of the selected signature.

In the E-Signing Sample, if you want to retrieve the E-Signature from your own browser, you can open the developer tools (F12 on Chrome), go to the application tab, select local storage, and inside you can find the JSON of the E-Signature in the value of pccvEsignSignatures.

Question

In PrizmDoc, my document appears to be small on the page relative to the viewer. How can I fix this?

enter image description here

Answer

By default, PrizmDoc renders a PDF file according to the MediaBox, which is normally the same as CropBox, though sometimes this is not the case. The larger area you see in the PrizmDoc Viewer is the size of the MediaBox. Please note that the product provides the fileTypes.pdf.pageBoundaries control option (or useCropBox in the older versions) to change the default behavior. Try setting the option to cropBox in the Central Configuration File in order to get the PDF content rendered according to the CropBox. You can read more about configuring image frame rendering in our documentation here.

For additional reading, see 7.7.3.3 on “User Space” of Adobe’s PDF 1.7 specification:

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/PDF32000_2008.pdf

Note: In some older versions of PrizmDoc, there exists an issue where setting the pageBoundaries field to cropBox can cause light blurring/distorting on the page. This issue was addressed in version 13.4.