Technical FAQs

What type of license should I be using?

Accusoft supports 3 primary license types: Evaluation, Toolkit, and Runtime licenses.

Evaluation License:

An Evaluation license is available upon download and will allow you to try our products and determine if they will suit your needs. Most downloads include free demo applications that demonstrate the core functionality of our product and will show you how to get up and running integrating Accusoft products with your solution. While the Evaluation license is free to download it does come with some restrictions. These restrictions may come in the form of water marked documents, pop-up dialogue boxes, or a time limit on the Evaluation license itself.

Toolkit License:

Should you decide that an Accusoft product is right for you, the next step should be to purchase one or more of our Toolkit licenses. Accusoft requires each developer using an Accusoft component to have a Toolkit license on their development machine. Once registered, the Toolkit license will unlock all restrictions of the Evaluation license. Please note, the Toolkit license is strictly to be used for development purposes, and when activated, it will be tied the specific development machine that it was registered on. Understandably, the occasion may arise where a Toolkit license needs to be moved from one development machine to another. In such a scenario, please contact sales@accusoft to see if this is feasible. For more information on how to register a Toolkit license on a development machine please see the ‘Toolkit Licensing’ section of your products Help documentation.

Runtime License:

Finally, once you have completed your solution and are ready for deployment, you will need to purchase a Runtime license. Accusoft offers 2 types of Runtime licenses. Most commonly, you will purchase an Automatically Reported Runtime (or Node-Locked) license, which requires a license for every machine your solution will be deployed to. It is very important to note that Runtime licenses are tied to the machine they are activated on and should not be used for development purposes. Doing so will quickly use up your Runtime licenses and cannot be refunded. For more information about how to activate an Automatically Reported Runtime license, please see the ‘Automatically Reported Runtime License’ section of your products Help documentation. In certain circumstances, Accusoft will issue a Manually Reported Runtime licenses that allow you to embed all of the licensing information directly into your application. These licenses are only distributed under certain circumstances and eligibility is determined by Accusoft sales. For more information on how to activate this type of license, please see the ‘Manually Reported Runtime License’ section of your products Help documentation.

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.

We are adding files to the viewing session with HttpWebRequests. We noticed with larger files the response is:

(413) Request Entity Too Large. -  at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse(). 

What could be the cause?   

A 413 request entity too large error occurs when a request made from a client is too large to be processed by the web server. If your web server is setting a particular HTTP request size limit, clients may come across a 413 request entity too large response. An example request that may cause this error would be if a client was trying to upload a large file to the server (e.g., a large media file).

Depending on which web server you use, implement the necessary changes described below to configure your web server’s maximum HTTP request size allowance. Below are some suggestions for popular Web Servers:

For Nginx users:

The directive that determines the allowable HTTP request size is client_max_body_size. This directive can be defined in your nginx.conf file located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

For Apache users:

The directive is LimitRequestBody which can be defined in your http.conf file or in an .htaccess file.

For IIS users:

1. Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
2. In the Connections pane, go to the connection, site, application, or directory for which you want to modify your request filtering settings.
3. In the Home pane, double-click Request Filtering.
4. Click Edit Feature Settings in the Actions pane.

When printing non-standard size raster images with PrizmDoc they can sometimes become cutoff if too tall or wide. How can I correctly print a non-standard size raster image with PrizmDoc?

(This explanation is done for a tall portrait image, but can be altered to work for a wide landscape image by flipping the width and height.)

To do this, you have to add a custom paper size to viewerCustomization.js and specify a smaller width so that there is enough room to fit the height of the image on a single page.

To find the correct width value so that the image will fit on a single page, you will need to do some math. In this example, we’ll use an image that is 1305×2823. In this case, the width is 46.2% of the height. If you want to print onto 8.5×11 inch paper, then the width you want to set for your new custom paper size is 11*0.462, which comes out to 5.082.

So now that you have the width, you need to create the new custom paper size. In viewerCustomization.js in the templates section, find the "print" template and add the following code where the other printing paper sizes are located.

/*custom */
.portrait .custom.page { width: 5.082in; height: 11in; margin: 0 auto !important; }
.portrait .custom.pageIE { width: 9.5in; height: 9.5in; margin: 0 auto !important; }
.portrait .custom.pageSafari { width: 8.9in; height: 8.9in; margin: 0 auto !important; }
.portrait .custom.nomargins { width: 11in !important; height: 11in !important; }

/* even without margins, Safari enforces the printer's non-printable area */
.portrait .custom.nomargins.pageSafari { width: 9.32in !important; height: 9.32in !important; }

.landscape .custom.page { height: 5.082in; width: 11in; margin: 0 auto !important; }
.landscape .custom.pageIE { height: 9.05in; width: 9.05in; margin: 0 auto !important; }
.landscape .custom.pageSafari { height: 8.4in; width: 8.4in; margin: 0 auto !important; }
.landscape .custom.nomargins { height: 11in !important; width: 11in !important; }
.landscape .custom.nomargins.pageSafari { height: 9.32in !important; width: 9.32in !important; }
/*custom end*/

As you can see, the width for .portrait .custom.page was set to 5.082in, and the height set to 11in. This will scale the 1305×2823 image to fit on a single 8.5×11 page when printing. By flipping the values and setting them in .landscape you would be able to print a 2823×1305 image on a single landscape page. (Just to note, I only edited the values for .custom.page for portrait and landscape. The others would most likely need to be changed.)

Next you need to add an option for your new paper size to the "paperSize" selection tag in the "printOverlay" section of templates in viewerCustomization.js. Your select tag should end up looking something like this:

<select data-pcc-select="paperSize" class="pcc-print-select">
    <!-- US and International-->
    <option value="letter"><%= paperSizes.letter %></option>
    <option value="legal"><%= paperSizes.legal %></option>
    <option value="tabloid"><%= paperSizes.tabloid %></option>
    <option value="foolscap"><%= paperSizes.foolscap %></option>
    <!-- A formats-->
    <option value="a3"><%= paperSizes.a3 %></option>
    <option value="a4"><%= paperSizes.a4 %></option>
    <option value="a5"><%= paperSizes.a5 %></option>
    <!-- Architectural-->
    <option value="a6"><%= paperSizes.a6 %></option>
    <option value="a"><%= paperSizes.a %></option>
    <option value="b"><%= paperSizes.b %></option>
    <option value="c"><%= paperSizes.c %></option>
    <option value="d"><%= paperSizes.d %></option>
    <option value="e"><%= paperSizes.e %></option>
    <option value="e1"><%= paperSizes.e1 %></option>
        
    <option value="custom">Custom</option>
</select>

The new print option should now appear in the PrizmDoc print settings when selecting a paper size, and it should print the image on a single page.

One thing to note is that you will have to do this for each differently sized image. If you are unsure of the size of uploaded documents, this solution will most likely not be usable.

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.

I want the Thumbnail tab in PrizmDoc Viewer to be open by default. How can this be done?

A simple solution could be to simply implement a ‘click-on-the-button’ when you first open the Viewer, if you’re fine with the user being able to close the thumbnail pane:

$("[data-pcc-toggle=\"dialog-thumbnails\"]").click();

If you’d rather have the tab always open, in viewer.js there’s a function called toggleDialogs(opts) that checks for whether the thumbnail pane is being toggled through the opts.toggleID, and if so, adds openClass to the thumbDialog. You could modify this logic so that the thumbnail pane is permanently open.

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.

We have been noticing in our PrizmDoc environment that the viewer seems to take longer and longer to view documents over time. After a few days, we restart the Prizm services, and the Viewer processes faster. What might be the reason for this issue?

This issue is typically caused by a change in the core count of the server after PrizmDoc has been installed. Specifically, the non-interactive heap size will not automatically update if the core count is changed after PrizmDoc has been installed. We update this value during install.

If you have made changes to the core count of the server after installation, please see the following page for correlation between the non-interactive heap size and the CPU cores count:
https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/registry-changes.html?highlight=heap%2C.

The reason the non-interactive heap size matters here is because it affects performance of the Office and HTML conversion services, and the symptom of insufficient non-interactive heap size is soffice.bin crashing.

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.

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.