Technical FAQs for "PrizmDoc"

With a fully-running PrizmDoc environment (version prior to v10.5), I’m noticing times where the system becomes unresponsive. That is, at some point, it no longer processes requests being made to the backend and I have to restart PrizmDoc in order to alleviate it. What could be causing this?

Prior to version 10.5, PrizmDoc used ProxyServer as its image processing system. Our Development Team eventually began seeing that the ProxyServer exhibited architectural problems that lead to a multitude of issues, such as unresponsiveness.

Starting in version 10.5, the Development Team created the Prizm Content Connect Imaging Service (PCCIS), which is far more stable.

To resolve this issue we suggest upgrading to the latest revision of PrizmDoc. Please see the product page for more information found here: https://www.accusoft.com/products/prizmdoc/overview/

Are there any specific applications or folders which should be excluded in order for PrizmDoc to work on a system with antivirus software?

As a suggestion, the first place to start would be your antivirus logs to ensure there are no entries specific to the following services:

• conhost.exe
• node.exe
• policyhost.exe
• PrizmApplicationServices.exe
• wmiprvse.exe

If there are, you can exclude those files or the following folders where PrizmDoc is installed by default. If you modified the folder name for PrizmDoc, ensure to include that name.

• C:\Prizm
• C:\ProgramData\Accusoft

Please consult your antivirus documentation for instructions on how to add exclusions.

If I have a PDF document that only has an embedded image in it (no text objects, etc.), can PrizmDoc Viewer take it and create a searchable PDF file from it?

Yes. PrizmDoc’s Content Conversion Services can take an image-only PDF and create a searchable PDF file from it. This can be done by modifying the input.dest.pdfOptions.ocr options object; see our documentation here.

If you are attempting to make a searchable PDF from an existing PDF document, please note that the source PDF file should be an image-only PDF. PrizmDoc will not create a searchable file from already-existing vector content.

This feature was introduced in PrizmDoc 13.1, please see our Release Notes for more information.

In PrizmDoc, why do I fail to load/convert Excel documents with the error “Exception from HRESULT: 0x800AC472”?

The error message Exception from HRESULT: 0x800AC472 is usually associated with a failure involving an Excel document, found in the MsOfficeConverter.log. Below are some known triggers of it:

If the user is logged in as “SYSTEM”, “LocalSystem”, or any other non-user-account variant, this will cause PrizmDoc to fail when using MSO services. This is expected behavior when working with Microsoft Office documents in PrizmDoc. Please see step 6 of the Windows Installation documentation regarding this:

http://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#windows-installation.html

“Specify the login account (account name and password) that PrizmDoc Server will run under. If you are using the Microsoft Office (MSO) Conversion add-on, please make sure that the “login account” is a real user account with Administrator rights. Running PrizmDoc under the LocalSystem user or another Microsoft Windows integrated service account is not supported for this option.”

It’s also crucial that the copy of Microsoft Office on the system has been activated. A not-licensed, not-activated, expired, or trial license will all cause Microsoft Office to not work with PrizmDoc.

More information: https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/windows-requirements.html

“The installed copy of Microsoft Office must be activated in order for PrizmDoc’s Microsoft Office Conversion Service to work properly. Not licensed, not activated, an expired or trial version of Microsoft Office will not work with PrizmDoc.”

Your default printer must be the Microsoft XPS Document Writer when working with Excel documents in PrizmDoc. Specifying another printer could possibly lead to this exception.

More information: http://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/natively-render-mso-documents.html

“The Microsoft Office Conversion Service requires the Microsoft XPS Document Writer printer driver to be installed for the best conversion performance and rendering fidelity of MS Excel documents”

Ensure the Print Spooler service is started and the Microsoft XPS Document Writer is the default printer.

There is a known issue with version 13.3 of PrizmDoc where completely blank Excel files are not loadable in the Viewer. They will fail to load and throw the aforementioned HRESULT exception. This has been fixed in PrizmDoc version 13.6.

In short, please set up the PrizmDoc service correctly to run with a real user account, ensure the copy of Microsoft Office has been activated, and make sure the default printer is set to “Microsoft XPS Document Writer”, then restart the service. This should fix this particular issue in most cases.

For more reading on considerations that Microsoft recommends when running their client-side MSO applications on the server, see this article:

Considerations for server-side Automation of Office

In PrizmDoc, why can’t I delete a full page redaction? The menu pops up for a rectangle redaction, so why not for a full page?

First, some terminology for PrizmDoc Viewer menus:

Traditionally, when you right click on a page, application, etc. the menu that pops up is called the “context menu”. However, in PrizmDoc, we refer to that menu as the Immediate Actions Menu, and there is a larger box that appears off to the side that we call the Context Menu. 

This functionality is viewable in the demo linked below. When you create a full page redaction and right-click on it, you get the Immediate Actions Menu. When you create a rectangle redaction and left- or right-click on it, off to the side you’ll see the Context Menu, and can delete it using either that menu or the “delete” key.

https://www.accusoft.com/demos/redaction-demo/

When you make a full page redaction, the only way to delete it is by using the delete button in the Immediate Actions Menu. You cannot click on it and press “delete”, and you cannot delete it via our Context Menu. This is currently a design feature being discussed below at the time of writing:

https://ideas.accusoft.com/ideas/PDEN-I-512

By default, the parameter immediateActionMenuMode is set to off, which disables the menu. If you are having trouble getting this menu to open in your application, you may need to set it to be on when you have a redaction on the page. You can read more about enabling and disabling this feature here.

If I upload an HTML document to PrizmDoc that has image tags in it, will those images be rendered in the Viewer or will only the text be displayed?

What if the image tags are referencing local images?

When loading an HTML file, PrizmDoc will render image tags that are sourced from publicly accessible URLs. The relative links may not render though, as it’s likely that the source will not be found.

In PrizmDoc 13.2, a server-side configuration option called:

security.htmlRendering.blockExternalContent

was introduced to control whether or not externally-referenced HTML content will be blocked.

See the release notes for more information.

With PrizmDoc Viewer, can I have more than a single viewer on the same page?

Yes, just initialize a second viewer on another <div> in the page. You can use the initialization code here more than once within the same page.

By default, in the PrizmDoc Viewer, links are highlighted and underlined in blue. To follow links within a document, the user needs to click the link, wait for the floating popup to appear showing the link’s target URL, and then click that to actually follow the link. Is there a way to make this a single-click process and skip the floating popup?

The desired one-click functionality can be achieved by modifying the viewer.js source file:

Inspect around line ~9457; you’ll find the following else if block:

    } else if (ev.targetType === "documentHyperlink") {
        hyperlinkMenuHandler(ev, "view");
    }

This line of code executes when the user clicks on a link displayed within the Viewer. The call to hyperlinkMenuHandler is responsible for displaying the floating popup. If you’d like to immediately open the link in a new window/tab instead, replace the contents of the “if else” block with a call to window.open:

    } else if (ev.targetType === "documentHyperlink") {
        window.open(ev.hyperlink.href, '_blank');
    }

This will allow hyperlinks that appear in the Viewer to be followed in a new window/tab with a single-click.

Why am I seeing requests sent through pcc.ashx when they shouldn’t be?

The default option for the imageHandlerUrl is pcc.ashx so if, for instance, you misspelled imageHandlerUrl or in some other way do not have the setting properly implemented, you will see requests sent through pcc.ashx.

This has been seen when trying to set up the pas-service reverse proxy redirect for Prizm Application Services (PAS).

A sample implementation of this setting can be found in the viewer.js around line 288.

options.imageHandlerUrl = options.imageHandlerUrl || "../pcc.ashx";

When using the PrizmDoc samples, the sample documents included are taking close to 1 minute to load in the viewer. The same also happens when uploading files into the sample.

The server processes are showing minimal impact on CPU and memory. However, the hard drive was spiking to 100% utilization sporadically.

We have found that Windows Defender with enabled Real-Time scanning can significantly impact performance. Once Real-Time scanning was disabled, we found this issue to be immediately resolved.

To disable Windows Defender, you can do the following:

1. Right-click on the Windows Logo in the lower left-hand corner and select Control Panel.
2. Select Windows Defender and then select Settings.
3. Under the Real-Time protection section, slide the switch to Off.

In PrizmDoc, my text annotation won’t fit the bounding box as if there is padding on the text. How can I fix this?

Check to see if there’s any custom styling to the body tags. If you have any sort of padding applied to the “body” element in the CSS, it may affect the text annotation, which is a foreign object with a body tag in it.

What is the absolute bare minimum I need to use PrizmDoc Cloud?

This will allow you to load a document via a URL using PrizmDoc Cloud. Just include your PrizmDoc Cloud API key in the POST request headers.

Please note: This is purely intended as a proof-of-concept. You should never include your API key in your client-side Javascript.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang="en">
<head>
    <!-- Metadata -->
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
    <meta name="description" content="" />

    <!-- Title -->
    <title>AccuSample</title>

    <!-- Libraries -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/normalize/8.0.0/normalize.min.css">

    <!-- PrizmDoc CSS -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://raw.githack.com/Accusoft/hello-prizmdoc-viewer-with-nodejs-and-html/master/public/viewer-assets/css/viewercontrol.css">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://raw.githack.com/Accusoft/hello-prizmdoc-viewer-with-nodejs-and-html/master/public/viewer-assets/css/viewer.css">

    <!-- Inline Stylesheet -->
    <style></style>

</head>
<body>

    <!-- #viewer -->
    <div id="viewer" class="pccv pcc-full-screen"></div>

    <!-- Libraries -->
    <script src="https://raw.githack.com/Accusoft/hello-prizmdoc-viewer-with-nodejs-and-html/master/public/viewer-assets/js/jquery-3.4.1.min.js"></script>
    <script src="https://raw.githack.com/Accusoft/hello-prizmdoc-viewer-with-nodejs-and-html/master/public/viewer-assets/js/jquery.hotkeys.min.js"></script>
    <script src="https://raw.githack.com/Accusoft/hello-prizmdoc-viewer-with-nodejs-and-html/master/public/viewer-assets/js/underscore.min.js"></script>

    <!-- PrizmDoc JS -->
    <script src="https://raw.githack.com/Accusoft/hello-prizmdoc-viewer-with-nodejs-and-html/master/public/viewer-assets/js/viewercontrol.js"></script>
    <script src="https://raw.githack.com/Accusoft/hello-prizmdoc-viewer-with-nodejs-and-html/master/public/viewer-assets/js/viewer.js"></script>
    <script src="https://raw.githack.com/Accusoft/hello-prizmdoc-viewer-with-nodejs-and-html/master/public/viewer-assets/js/viewerCustomizations.js"></script>

    <!-- Inline Script -->
    <script>

        let viewingSessionId;
        let viewerControl;

        $(document).ready(function() {
            $.ajax({
                "type": "POST",
                "url": "https://api.accusoft.com/prizmdoc/ViewingSession",
                "headers": {
                    "acs-api-key": "4lTamQVZmrkqZhH8cZhdu7L0xyhUa3gorcaCFQpA_zmuowZs4zoF39V4IckpnVW_"
                },
                "data": JSON.stringify({
                    "source": {
                        "type": "url",
                        "url": "https://www.usability.gov/sites/default/files/creating-wireframes.pdf"
                    }
                })
            }).done(function(response) {
                PCCViewer.Ajax.setHeaders({
                    "acs-api-key": "4lTamQVZmrkqZhH8cZhdu7L0xyhUa3gorcaCFQpA_zmuowZs4zoF39V4IckpnVW_"
                });

                viewingSessionId = response["viewingSessionId"];

                // Initialize viewer
                viewerControl = $("#viewer").pccViewer({ 
                    "documentID": viewingSessionId,
                    "imageHandlerUrl": "https://api.accusoft.com/prizmdoc",
                    "language": viewerCustomizations.languages["en-US"],
                    "template": viewerCustomizations.template,
                    "icons": viewerCustomizations.icons,
                    "annotationsMode": "LayeredAnnotations"
                }).viewerControl;

                viewerControl.on("ViewerReady", function() {
                    console.log("Ready!");
                });
            });
        });

    </script>

</body>
</html>