Technical FAQs

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.

Sometimes, when redacting an Office or PDF document, redactions drawn over certain content (such as an image or a logo) appears to get burned on other occurrences of the image on other pages. Why does this happen?

The reason why the duplicate redactions are occurring is because the images are shared images. In PrizmDoc, when a change is made to one instance of the shared image, it gets applied to every other instance. Per engineering, this is to mimic the behavior of Adobe Acrobat.

There currently exists a feature request to allow shared images to be treated as individual images so that they could be redacted separately:

https://ideas.accusoft.com/ideas/PDV-I-655

We just installed the PrizmDoc client and noticed that when we run Prizm Application Services, the service states that it is started, but it is not listening on 3000, and there are no logs written to the Prizm\logs\pas folder. What might the issue be?

A possible reason for this issue can be due to the Windows system environment variable called PATHEXT. By default, .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC are configured.

What this variable does is allow commands to be executed without needing to add the extension to them.

For example, PM2, which runs with PAS, has a file extension of .CMD, so when executing PM2 in a command line you just need to type PM2 instead of the full name PM2.CMD.

If .CMD is not in the PATHEXT environment variable, then just typing PM2 would return a command not found error, and you would need to use the full PM2.CMD for it to work.

To fix the issue, ensure the following:

1. Open Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > System
2. Select Advanced System Settings
3. Select Environment Variables
4. Under System Variables double-click PATHEXT
5. Add to the end of the current string
6. Restart Prizm Application Services

How can I make significant changes to the UI of a PrizmDoc sample?

While jQuery can be used to make some small changes to the samples UI, it does not always make sense to make your changes programmatically on the front-end.

In this case, you will want to make your UI changes to the HTML templates used to compile the template that is passed in during viewer initialization.

To make changes and recompile the templates, you can utilize the following GitHub repository:

https://github.com/Accusoft/prizmdoc-viewer

We are using PrizmDoc and may be adding more end users, so we wanted to verify whether there is a limit to the number of viewing sessions that can be active at one time.

PrizmDoc does not specifically limit the number of viewing sessions that can be active at any given time. However, when opening a viewing session with a document, a conversion does take place. The number of conversions that can be handled simultaneously is based on the hardware constraints of your server.

Various factors, such as the size of documents, the number of conversions, and the hardware being utilized may impact the performance of your PrizmDoc server.

We provide server sizing and performance documentation that is designed to provide guidance and approximate server size based on the number of conversions you plan to do per minute.

Please refer to our documentation page:

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#prizmdoc-server-sizing-servers.html

When doing a text search in a document in PrizmDoc, the highlight color for the search results is a light blue background. Is there a way to change the highlight color for search results in the PrizmDoc Viewer?

You can change the highlight color specifically in the PrizmDoc Viewer file viewer.js file located in the viewer-assets\js folder of your project/application.

You will need to locate 2 instances of the search term “highlightColor: undefined” in the code block below located close to line 4400. The actual line number will vary depending on the version of viewer.js you are using. You can replace “undefined” with a hexadecimal color value which you can look up from the following site: https://htmlcolorcodes.com/

// This is a request for a new searchQuery triggered by the search input field.
// Generate new search terms, and save them globally.
prevMatchingOptions = _.clone(matchingOptions);

if (matchingOptions.exactPhrase) {
    // We need to match the exact string, as is
    if (queryString.length) {
        searchTerms.push({
            searchTerm: queryString,
            highlightColor: undefined,
            searchTermIsRegex: false,
            contextPadding: 25,
            matchingOptions: matchingOptions
        });
    }
} else {
    // Split up multiple words in the string into separate search term objects
    var queryArr = queryString.split(' ');
    queryArr = _.unique(queryArr);
    _.forEach(queryArr, function(query){
        if (query.length) {
            searchTerms.push({
                searchTerm: query,
                highlightColor: undefined,
                searchTermIsRegex: false,
                contextPadding: 25,
                matchingOptions: matchingOptions
            });
        }
    });
}         

When trying to create a viewing session directory to the PrizmDoc back end over port 18681:

(POST http://prizmserver:18681/PCCIS/V1/ViewingSession)

why am I receiving a 500 internal server error?

There are some troubleshooting steps below you can take to verify the health of the server as well as ensure the API call you are making is properly formatted.

1. Verify the Prizm service is healthy by opening a browser on the Prizm server and using the following service health check URL (http://localhost:18681/admin)
2. Verify your POST command has all the required elements which can be verified in detail on the following documentation page:

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#viewing-sessions.html

I want to load an HTML document in PrizmDoc with UTF-8 encoding. Can this be done automatically in the product?

Currently, no. We have a parameter for .txt files which does that (detailed here), but this “textFileEncoding” intentionally only works for .txt, not .html files. There is a feature request for this:

https://ideas.accusoft.com/ideas/PDV-I-546

In the meantime, this can be fixed manually by adding charset = “utf-8” to the meta tag of the HTML document. One POC way this might be done programmatically is below in Python 3.7 (need obvious polishing like checking for the tag already existing, multiple “meta” tags, etc):

with open(filename, "r") as file:
    content = file.read()

index = content.find("meta") + len("meta")

new_content = content[:index] + " charset=\"utf-8\" " + content[index:]

with open(filename, "w") as file:
    file.write(new_content)

The http://localhost:3000/servicesConnection returns a 580 error. What could the issue be?

This indicates that PAS cannot communicate with the backend.

To fix this, verify that the PCCIS connection configuration section of pcc.*.yml is correct and that the backend is healthy and listening.

If the issue persists, check the logs/pas/pas-*.log files for network related issues.

For more information, see the Connection Issues topic.

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, I can get the coordinates of a Click event. However, this corresponds to the window coordinates of my viewer. How can I translate this to coordinates of the actual page?

As specified in our documentation here, PrizmDoc offers the following method:

convertPageToWindowCoordinates(pageNumber, points)

This appears to do the opposite of what we want: it takes in a page number and coordinates of the page, and converts them and outputs window coordinates. However, we can use this to get what we want. Suppose we test coordinates (0,0) of the page, we should get:

Page: (0,0)
Window: (0,0)

Now let’s test point (0,1) of the page, let’s call this a “Unit Distance”. Suppose we get back:

Page: (0, 1)
Window: (0, 5)

If the function gave us this, then we know that the coordinate transformation along the Y-axis is a factor of 5. Now whenever we want to know the correct image coordinate, we can simply divide our window’s Y coordinate by 5. Programmatically, you should be able to take the information from the Unit Distance in both the X and Y axis, and create a function in which you input Window Coordinates and output Page Coordinates.

What quality should my images be for processing form data and recognition using FormSuite?

In all cases, you want to have your images as clear and as clean as possible. For any particular procedure, please consider the following:

OCR and ICR: Capture images in at least 300 DPI resolution. Ideally, working in black and white allows the objects of interest on your image to be better defined and recognized. Free the image form all noise as much as possible. As if a human were reading it, you want the text objects on the image to be as legible as possible. For ICR, ensure that the characters are printed (no cursive text, etc).

Barcode recognition: As with OCR and ICR, capture images in at least 300 DPI and working with black and white content can provide excellent results. Ensure that the bars in the barcodes are clearly defined on the image and are not malformed (for example, the barcodes should have the proper start and stop sequence, etc). Clear as much noise from the image as possible.

Forms matching and registration: As with the prior 2 items above, capture your documents in at least 300 DPI. Ensure that your resolution is consistent between your form templates and incoming batch images. Form templates should only contain data that is common to every image that is being processed (i.e. Form fields, the text that appears on the blank form itself, etc). The template should not have filled-in field information as this will affect the forms matching process.