Previewer never loads document.

[jrosengren]

I'm trying to get the Flash previewer to work in Share.  I'm using 3.2r and have OpenOffice 3 and swftools 0.9 installed on CentOS 5.4.

When I click on a Word document in Share, the document information page displays correctly, and the flash previewer loads correctly, however, the spinning progress icon inside the flash viewer never loads anything.  The flash viewer does seem to finish loading and display a preview for a PDF document.

This sounds like a problem with the process that sends Office documents to OpenOffice for transformation and then to swftools.  Is there any way I can diagnose this further since I'm not seeing anything in the logs while this is happening?

Thanks,

– jeremy

[tstolpma]

I have experienced exactly the same problem with Alfresco 3.2 r2 under CentOS 5.4. The solution here was to uninstall the swftools-0.8.1 RPM via yum which resides at a different path than the precompiled swftools-0.9.0 package mentioned at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Installing_Alfresco_Community_3.2r_WAR_on_Centos_5.4.

Probably alfresco always picked up the older binary.

HTH

[chrisb]

I know this thread is a little old now, but I have seen a very similar issue with Share on Alfresco 3.0SP1 (enterprise) and came across some related information on swftools that may be useful to others.

The issue we are seeing is large complex PDFs (200+ pages with images and tables) are not previewing in Share. The thumbnails generate OK but as soon as you try and preview the docs you just get the spinning preview wheel indefinitely. After chatting with support and doing some googling and a few tests with different PDFs, it seems that the issue I am seeing is related to a limitation within the SWFTools library - there is a maximum complexity of PDF that the SWFTools library can process before it runs out of resources. From what I have read, the complexity is based on the number of objects SWFTools needs to create to process the PDF, so its hard to give guidelines as to when the failure will occur. A long, simple text only PDF may preview fine, but the limit may be reached in fewer pages on a PDF document with a lot of images / tables or diagrams.

The limits are discussed briefly in the last thread in this discussion here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/swftools-common@nongnu.org/msg01965.html

Although the post is 2008, it seems the limit is still a factor based on my own tests with the latest 0.9.1 version of SWFTools. You can test whether non previewing docs are falling foul of the limit my trying to convert the PDF manually using the SWFTools command line tools under Linux, or running the test app that ships with the Windows installer for Windows platforms.

Does anyone know if there are any alternatives to SWFTools or a workaround for this?

At the moment the only solution that comes to mind is asking users to split up longer / more complex PDFs into separate documents which (quite understandably) doesn't go down too well! It does seem to be possible to configure SWFTools to generate previews by converting all content to bitmaps, but the resulting text quality is quite poor and the file sizes are huge.

[zaizi]

You can specify a page range argument for pdf2swf and combine the subsequent swf files. You'll have to write a custom transformer to do this in Alfresco.

Ainga

[chrisb]

Thanks Ainga - will look into that if there are no easier options.

I did notice when testing with the SWFTools gui app on Windows that if you configure the option to "convert fonts to fonts, everything else to bitmap" transforming the problem PDF completes OK. The image/graphics quality is not fantastic, but I think its acceptable. I just need to work out the bean config settings for the SWF->PDF transform process to make the transform use an equivalent setting.

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETHREEOH-3023 gives some suggestions on this, but it refers to a 3.2 config setup, which is different to the 3.0SP1 setup we are currently running.

If anyone knows the bean config settings I would need to use to make the "convert fonts to fonts, everything else to bitmap" the default for the transformation I would appreciate any pointers. Ideally I'd like to use the extension override mechanism to make the change so as not to interfere with the default Alfresco install.

Thanks