Technical FAQs

The PrizmDoc Office Conversion Service on my localhost:18681/admin page says it’s “Starting” or has failed to start. What could the issue be?

This indicates that the license key provided is not licensed for the Microsoft Office Conversion feature.

To fix this, modify the fidelity.msOfficeDocumentsRenderer property in prizm-services-config.yml.

For information on the supported values, see the Fidelity section in the Central Configuration topic.

We are running PrizmDoc on a Windows operating system and we noticed that our ms-office-conversion-service remained unhealthy even through a restart of the service. We also noticed an error in the MsOfficeConverter.log referencing the following error. What could be the cause?

“WARN – COM error occurs on 1 initialization attempt. Retrieving the
COM class factory for component with CLSID
{000209FF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} failed due to the following
error: 80080005 Server execution failed (Exception from HRESULT:
0x80080005 (CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE))”

The PrizmDoc MSO feature requires either Microsoft Office 2013 or 2016 to be installed in order to function properly. Based on the error, there is a Microsoft Office specific .dll file which is not registered properly.

The following process will re-register the .dll files and potentially resolve this issue (Note: for Step 2, this may vary depending on what directory you used to install Microsoft Office and the version of Office. You want to find the directory containing winword.exe):

1. Run Command Prompt as Admin.
2. Type cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15 or cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16
3. Run winword.exe -regserver.
4. Reboot the server.

If you don’t have the Prizm service set up to run on boot then make sure that Office applications are started by PrizmDoc, or from the command line, before being opened manually.

The PrizmDoc Office Conversion Service on my localhost:18681/admin page says it’s “Starting” or has failed to start. What could the issue be?

This indicates that the license key provided is not licensed for the Microsoft Office Conversion feature.

To fix this, modify the fidelity.msOfficeDocumentsRenderer property in prizm-services-config.yml.

For information on the supported values, see the Fidelity section in the Central Configuration topic.

What ports need to be open on my server in order for PrizmDoc to function correctly?

PrizmDoc Server needs to be able to communicate internally over the following ports:

• 18000
• 18001
• 19000-19199

And externally over 18681 (18682 if clustered).

Prizm Application Services (PAS) needs to be able to communicate externally over the following ports:

• 3000

In the PrizmDoc Viewer, what are the two different ways to load annotation layers?

PrizmDoc has two options for loading annotations, the “My Annotations” pane and the “Annotations for Review” pane.

The “My Annotations” pane is used to load a single annotation layer for editing. You can add, delete, or make changes to annotations and then save those changes using the “My Annotations” pane.

The “Annotations for Review” pane is used for viewing annotations. You can load as many annotation layers for viewing as you would like. You cannot interact with annotations loaded in this way, but you are able to make comments on them. You can toggle between any of these layers to hide them. You can also merge these annotations to the currently loaded annotation layer from “My Annotations”.

For more information see our documentation here: https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/Annotation_Layers.html

What browsers are supported by Accusoft PDF Viewer?

• Windows: All chromium based browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.
• Mac: Safari
• iOS: Native Safari Browser
• Android: Native Chrome Browser

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.

What are the different ways to iterate through and select redactions in PrizmDoc Viewer?

Method 1:
Use the mouse to manually select the redactions you want to work with.

Method 2:
With the advancedSearch feature enabled, perform a search of your document. The search will return a list of marks on the document that you can use to select redactions without having to manually locate where they are in the document.

I would like to remove the mark selection handles from the marks (annotations and redactions) in the viewer so that my users can’t resize marks, but so they can still move the marks around. How can I do this?

The easiest way to achieve the functionality you’re looking for would be to simply change the CSS for the mark handles to set their display to none !important. The CSS for the mark handles can be found in viewercontrol.css. See the following code for an example:

/* mark selection handles */
.pccMarkHandleTopLeft,
.pccMarkHandleTopCenter,
.pccMarkHandleTopRight,
.pccMarkHandleMidLeft,
.pccMarkHandleMidRight,
.pccMarkHandleBottomLeft,
.pccMarkHandleBottomCenter,
.pccMarkHandleBottomRight,
.pccMarkHandlePoint,
.pccMarkHandleTextSelectionStart,
.pccMarkHandleTextSelectionEnd {
    position: absolute;
    width: 40px;
    height: 40px;
    display: none !important;
    background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw...);
}

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2), 
       screen and (min-resolution: 2dppx),
       screen and (min-resolution: 192dpi) {
    .pccMarkHandleTopLeft, 
    .pccMarkHandleTopCenter, 
    .pccMarkHandleTopRight, 
    .pccMarkHandleMidLeft, 
    .pccMarkHandleMidRight, 
    .pccMarkHandleBottomLeft, 
    .pccMarkHandleBottomCenter, 
    .pccMarkHandleBottomRight, 
    .pccMarkHandlePoint, 
    .pccMarkHandleTextSelectionStart, 
    .pccMarkHandleTextSelectionEnd {
        -webkit-background-size: 40px 40px;
                background-size: 40px;
        display: none !important;
        background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw...);
    }
}

You will want to set the !important flag so that the functions inside viewercontrol don’t set the display back to block.

One thing you may want to do is separate out pccMarkHandleTextSelectionStart and pccMarkHandleTextSelectionEnd to not include display: none. This way, the text selection annotations are able to be edited, since they are reliant on the handles for "movement" because they select a portion of the text signified by the handles. 

How accurate is PrizmDoc Viewer’s auto-redaction process? Is there any estimate of the percentage of matches that it will fail to redact?

If you’re performing auto-redaction as described in our documentation, then all matches for the input regular expression will be redacted in the final document. However, it’s difficult to express that confidence in the form of a percentage. PrizmDoc is subjected to a suite of automatic testing to ensure that its services are behaving as intended, including redactions. We never release a new version unless it passes 100% of those tests.

That being said, the primary way that inaccuracy could enter the system is if you’re attempting to redact scanned documents that have been OCRed. In this case, it’s a matter of your OCR software’s accuracy, rather than the accuracy of PrizmDoc’s redaction process. If the searchable text of the document doesn’t accurately reflect the visible text on the page (for example, if a smudged “discovery” is incorrectly recognized as “disccvery”), then the auto-redaction will be unable to recognize it due to the incorrect input it has been given. This isn’t a problem if the documents were not OCRed.

How can I determine what version of PrizmDoc Viewer my server is running?

To check the server version, make a GET request to:

http://localhost:18681/PCCIS/V1/Service/Current/Info

You can make a get request by navigating to the URL in your browser. The JSON response will have a "pccisVersion" property, which is the version number you are looking for. A similar GET to the following URL will determine the PAS version:

http://localhost:3000/info

The JSON response’s "version" property is what you are looking for. Keep in mind that differing version numbers don’t necessarily indicate a mismatch, as long as the major and minor version numbers sync-up. For example, the PCCIS version 13.5.33.5696 and PAS version 13.5.0000.1816 are from the same release (13.5).

Why is the viewer not rendering my PDF?

Please check the developer console of your web browser to troubleshoot issues with documents not rendering, our product will report all errors and debugging information there.