Technical FAQs

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 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

Where can I find the documentation for Accusoft PDF Viewer?

Our product documentation is located here.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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();
    });
});

What are the technical details/process of “Flattening” a PDF document?

It is possible to “Flatten” PDF documents in PrizmDoc Viewer. You can do this by converting the document to a raster format (TIFF is recommended for PDF conversion) using PrizmDoc’s Content Conversion Service, and then converting it back to PDF format. This will result in a PDF with a single layer and no hidden objects. However, this will usually lower the quality and increase the file size of PDFs that are largely text.

Here is an example workflow using the Workfile API and the Content Conversion Service API:

1. Create a WorkFile from PDF

POST {{pccisUrl}}/PCCIS/V1/WorkFile
Content-Type: application/octet-stream

{{file bytes}}

2. Initiate Conversion to TIFF

POST {{pccisUrl}}/v2/contentConverters
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "input": {
        "sources": [
            {
                "fileId": "{{fileId}}"
            }
        ],
        "dest": {
            "format": "tiff"
        }
    }
}

3. Poll until response[“state”] === “complete”

GET {{pccisUrl}}/v2/contentConverters/{{processId}}

4. Initiate Conversion from TIFF back to PDF

POST {{pccisUrl}}/v2/contentConverters
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "input": {
        "sources": [
            {
                "fileId": "{{fileId_from_Step3_output}}"
            }
        ],
        "dest": {
            "format": "pdf"
        }
    }
}

5. Poll again

GET {{pccisUrl}}/v2/contentConverters/{{processId}}

6. Download

GET {{pccisUrl}}/PCCIS/V1/WorkFile/{{fileId}}?ContentDispositionFileName={{desiredFileNameWithExtension}}

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?

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.

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.