topic Re: Blurry Flash Preview in Alfresco Archive

Blurry Flash Preview

soborno — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:23:37 GMT

I have encountered a problem with flash preview, after I migrate alfresco from a server to another. I use the same version (3.3), and I follow the steps in http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Backup_and_Restore, I have no problem with that at all, all my documents are available to the users that are allow

Re: Blurry Flash Preview

soborno — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:42:20 GMT

Solved. It was a problem with swftools, apparently there were errors when it was compiled from source, I follow the steps in here: https://designbye.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/installing-swftools-and-pdf2swf-on-ubuntu-linux/, and have no more problems.

Re: Blurry Flash Preview

thoralt — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 11:44:41 GMT

Hi,

I stumbled across the same issue. I use Alfresco 4.0.a on Debian Linux. As suggested, I compiled the latest version of swftools, but the preview is still shown in low resolution. Do I need to update/compile/reinstall any components which swftools depends on? Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
Thoralt

Re: Blurry Flash Preview

soborno — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:45:49 GMT

Check your alfresco-global.properties, see if the swftools route is right for your current instalation, in my case with the steps I mention above it should be

swf.exe=/usr/local/bin/pdf2swf‍

.
Don`t forget to restart alfresco!

Regards,
Claudio

Re: Blurry Flash Preview

thoralt — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 06:47:35 GMT

Hi,

thank you for your reply. I verified my installation, alfresco-global.properties contains "swf.exe=/usr/local/bin/pdf2swf", and did restart Alfresco after the change.

I verified the installation of swftools:


alfresco:~# /usr/local/bin/pdf2swf -V
pdf2swf - part of swftools 0.9.1
‍‍‍‍

This shows that the right binary is in place (and it has a recent timestamp from my last "make install").

If I delete /usr/local/bin/pdf2swf, upload a new PDF and try to preview it, I get an error (preview not available). As soon as I copy back pdf2swf to /usr/local/bin, the PDF preview is possible. This shows that Alfresco is using the right file.

To sum it up: Alfresco uses my freshly compiled swftools 0.9.1 (I also tried 0.8.1 with same result).

Here's a screenshot what it looks like:

[img]http://www.thoralt.de/netbox/alfrescoscreenshot.png[/img]

Apparently Alfresco/swftools renders a pixel image instead of vector/glyph based data, which looks as shown above. How can I verify what's going wrong here? At the moment I don't know where to start…

Regards
Thoralt

Re: Blurry Flash Preview

soborno — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:02:27 GMT

I would start with swftools, test in the command line the pdf2swf tool (after all, is a tool for itself too) with some light pdf file, and then check the .swf, if its blurry, you have a problem with swftools.

Regards,
Claudio

Re: Blurry Flash Preview

thoralt — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:22:25 GMT

Thank you for the suggestion. I did the test and converted a pdf on the command line. If I load the resulting swf file with Firefox, it shows up normally. Even at highest magnification everything stays sharp, because it is vectorized. The same file within Alfresco stays blurred and rasterized.

My conclusion therefore is: Something between Alfresco and pdf2swf is wrong. I'll investigate that further.

Thoralt

Re: Blurry Flash Preview

thoralt — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:57:00 GMT

Hi there,

I did some debugging with pdf2swf. Alfresco uses the following command line to generate the preview:

/usr/local/bin/pdf2swf -T 9 -s zoom=72 -s ppmsubpixels=1 -s poly2bitmap=1 -s bitmapfonts=1 test.pdf -o test.swf
‍‍

If I use the options above in a terminal, I get the same blurry output. I have to remove the options "-s poly2bitmap=1" and "-s bitmapfonts=1" to get a perfect preview.

Now the question is: Why does Alfresco use "-s poly2bitmap=1" and "-s bitmapfonts=1"? How can I avoid that?

Best regards
Thoralt

EDIT: I found out myself. After grepping through my Alfresco installation I discovered "webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/subsystems/thirdparty/default/swf-transform.properties". There I changed the parameters to my needs. Now the preview is perfect

Re: Blurry Flash Preview

loftux — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:38:36 GMT

I have filed this as an issue
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALF-10870