Preview Issue

[kclark]

I am new to Alfresco and have been given the responsibility to fix issues the company is currently experiencing with their system.

When we open a document in Alfresco we receive a message stating “the preview could not be loaded from the server”. I tried to search the Help area but was not able to find a solution.

[jpotts]

Do any previews work?

If some work and some don't, is it a problem with a specific mimetype? Or is it just one file in particular?

Does it affect all users?

Are there any error messages in the Alfresco log?

[kclark]

Thank you for your reply, the preview is not working for any file type and is affecting all users.

I went through my instance but was not able to see a log file, where would that be located?

[jpotts]

If you installed using the binary installer, your log file is in $ALFRESCO_HOME/alfresco.log. There is also one in $ALFRESCO_HOME/tomcat/logs/catalina.out and alfresco.out

If you installed manually the log file is in $TOMCAT_HOME/logs/catalina.out.

It sounds to me like one or more of your dependencies are broken or not configured properly. Three dependencies that are key to previews are: OpenOffice, pdf2swf, and ImageMagick. All three must be installed and they must be configured in alfresco-global.properties.

Jeff

[rjohnson]

I notice this is a docx file. Alfresco uses OpenOffice / LibreOffice to render these through to PDF and then pdf2swf to create a flash page to display.

I have had this symptom in the past and it usually means that Libre / Open office has stopped responding. A system restart clears the issue. The problem is that Libre / Open office suffers from memory leaks and eventually runs out of memory to use.

You can restart the Libre / Open office service separately and there are scripts around the internet to do this.