PrizmDoc® v14.2 Release - Updated
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    This section contains information on new features, improvements, fixes, and known issues for each release.

    NOTE: View Current, Preview, and Archive builds of PrizmDoc.

    Release Notes v14.2 Release

    Released September 2024

    PrizmDoc Viewer v14.2 introduces the following:

    14.2 New Features and Improvements

    New Features

    • Auto Summarization. PrizmDoc Viewer now allows you to perform document summarization which provides concise summaries of lengthy documents. Users quickly grasp the essential points without reading through entire documents, leading to significant time savings and improved decision-making efficiency.

    • Auto Tagging and Classification. PrizmDoc Viewer now allows you to perform document tagging and classification which intelligently tags and categorizes content. Users quickly filter documents without reading through them, leading to significant time savings and organizational efficiency.

    • Document Q&A. PrizmDoc Viewer now allows you to perform document Q&A which retrieves pertinent information within documents. Users quickly and accurately query for important content information, eliminating the need to review large documents manually.

    • Viewing & Document Conversion of MS Word & OpenDocument Text Comments. The rendering of comments in Microsoft Word and OpenDocument Text documents is now enabled by default when running in the (LibreOffice) rendering mode.

      • The Content Conversion Service (CCS) can now convert Microsoft Word and OpenDocument Text documents with or without comments. See the CCS API guide for more information.
      • Introduced a new parameter in Central Configuration to control the rendering of comments in MS Word and OpenDocument Text documents for both LibreOffice and MS Office rendering modes. Please see the fileTypes.word.renderComments Central Configuration parameter for more information.

    • Viewing & Document Conversion of MS PowerPoint & OpenDocument Presentation Speaker Notes. You can now enable the rendering of Microsoft PowerPoint Presenter Notes when running in either the LibreOffice or MSO rendering modes.

      • The Content Conversion Service (CCS) can now convert Microsoft PowerPoint and OpenDocument Presentation documents with speaker notes when using the LibreOffice rendering mode. See the CCS API guide for more information.
      • Introduced a new parameter in Central Configuration to control rendering of speaker notes in MS PowerPoint and OpenDocument Presentation documents for both LibreOffice and MS Office rendering modes. Please see the fileTypes.powerPoint.renderingMode Central Configuration parameter for more information.

    • Menu Tabbing. PrizmDoc Viewer now supports navigating the top-level viewer menus via tabbing by default. This also improves screen reader and other accessibility device support.

    Improvements

    • Fast PDF viewing in Hybrid Viewer. The Hybrid Viewer viewing session now supports streaming of the PDF document pages from the server directly to the client viewer for display without downloading the whole document first. This results in a significantly shorter time for the Hybrid Viewer to display the first and subsequent pages for PDF documents.

    14.2 Product Updates and Fixes

    Product Updates

    • Addressed a limitation where the burning of text annotations with Italic style was only possible for fonts which had an Italic typeface.

    Product Fixes

    • Addressed an issue with PrizmDoc displaying placeholders instead of whitespaces on some PDFs that contain Japanese text.
    • Addressed an issue when sometimes a restart of a stopped prizmdoc-server Docker container caused an HTML conversion service startup failure.
    • Addressed an issue in PrizmDoc where it picked wrong fonts from TrueType Font Collection files (.ttc) when rendering PDF documents, causing character overlapping.
    • Addressed an issue in PrizmDoc Viewer Client where some contents of specific PDF documents were not displaying in the Hybrid Viewing mode.
    • Addressed an issue with TextInputSignature marks where the vertical positioning of the mark was incorrect when burned into the document.

    Security Updates

    • Addressed potential vulnerabilities in the Viewing Service and Workfile Service third-party components by updating them to the newer versions.
    • Addressed potential vulnerabilities in the PDF Processing Service (PDFPS) and Mongo Manager Service (MMS) third-party components by updating them to the newer versions.
    • Updated PrizmDoc Services, PrizmDoc Application Services (PAS), and accusoft/prizmdoc-viewer-eval container image to run on the newer Node.js v18.20.4, taking advantage of recent security fixes and other changes in Node.js.
    • Updated bundled version of Java included in our product to the newer Eclipse Temurin 11.0.24+8, taking advantage of recent security fixes and other changes in the JRE.
    • Updated third-party dependencies of the PrizmDoc Viewer Client, taking advantage of recent security fixes and other improvements.
    • Stopped using the Mono framework in PrizmDoc Server Docker image, addressing security issues associated with the Mono framework.

    14.2 Documentation Updates

    New Content

    Release Notes v14.1 Release

    Released July 2024

    PrizmDoc® v14.1 introduces the following:

    NOTE: See the Archived PrizmDoc v14.1 Documentation for documentation specific to that release.

    14.1 New Features and Improvements

    New Features

    • Improved HTML Document Rendering. We have modernized the HTML document rendering engine on both the Windows and Docker platforms which offers higher rendering fidelity of text, images, fonts, and other content within HTML and E-mail documents.

    14.1 Product Updates and Fixes

    Breaking Changes

    • Database Requirement. The use of a Central Database is now required. This change is being made to eliminate server affinity in a future release. See Configure the Central Database for more information.
    • The default value for viewing.sessionConstraints.documentSource.allowedValues has been changed to the more secure setting of [api].
    • The default value for security.htmlRendering.blockExternalContent has been changed to the more secure setting of true.
    • The default value for security.externalContent.requireHttps has been changed to the more secure setting of true. Setting this option to true will be allowed when using the MSO rendering engine, but you will still need to handle blocking non-HTTPS requests outside of PrizmDoc.
    • The default value for fileTypes.excel.formulas.autocalculate.enabled has been changed to the more secure setting of false.

    Product Updates

    Product Fixes

    • Addressed an issue in the PrizmDoc Client where setting data on a mouse tool template mark failed after recreating the mouse tool.
    • Addressed an issue in the Microsoft Office Conversion Connectivity when an office document conversion result could be routed improperly causing Viewing and Conversion failures.
    • Addressed an issue in PrizmDoc where it could not properly display specific PDF documents that contained embedded CID TrueType fonts.
    • Addressed an issue in PrizmDoc where it could not properly display PDF documents where the BaseName of a composite font did not match the BaseName of its descendant non-embedded font.
    • Addressed incorrect spacing when rendering half-width Asian characters in PDF documents with CID Font widths table containing overlapping entries.
    • Improved the rendering of specific Asian characters in PDF documents that use non-embedded fonts. This improvement was made by updating the character encoding tables used by the PDF Conversion Service (PDFCS) third-party components.

    Security Updates

    • Updated the Client-side Viewer and samples to the latest official version of jQuery v3.7.1, taking advantage of recent security fixes.
    • Updated Consul included in our product to version 1.19.0, taking advantage of recent security fixes.
    • Addressed issues in the PrizmDoc Server for Windows uninstall process.
    • Addressed potential vulnerabilities in the Vector Conversion Service (VCS) third-party components by updating them to the newer versions.
    • Addressed potential vulnerabilities in the PDF Conversion Service (PDFCS) third-party components by updating them to the newer versions.
    • Addressed potential vulnerabilities in the PrizmDoc Application Services (PAS) third-party components by updating them to the newer versions.
    • Several parameters in the Central Configuration have been changed to more secure default values. The changes are:
      • security.htmlRendering.blockExternalContent now defaults to true
      • security.externalContent.requireHttps now defaults to true
      • fileTypes.excel.formulas.autocalculate.enabled now defaults to false
      • viewing.sessionConstraints.documentSource.allowedValues now defaults to ['api']
    • Updated PrizmDoc Services, PrizmDoc Application Services (PAS) and accusoft/prizmdoc-viewer-eval container image to run on the newer Node.js v18.20.3, taking advantage of recent security fixes and other changes in Node.js.

    14.1 Documentation Updates

    Updated Content

    • Updated naming throughout the documentation from 'The Viewer' and 'PrizmDoc Viewer' to PrizmDoc.
    • Consolidated the Get Started section to make it easier to locate the information you need to evaluate and integrate PrizmDoc Viewer.
    • Updated the Evaluate PrizmDoc topic with steps to make it easier for you to get started evaluating PrizmDoc's features.
    • Updated Security Guidance in light of the new secure defaults for some central configurations.

    Release Notes v14.0 Release

    Released April 2024

    PrizmDoc® v14.0 introduces the following:

    NOTE: See the Archived PrizmDoc v14.0 Documentation for documentation specific to that release.

    14.0 New Features and Improvements

    New Features

    • Improved Office Document Rendering. We have improved the default Office document rendering mode which offers better rendering quality of text, charts, tables, and other content within Microsoft Office documents without having to install and use Microsoft Office. If you're an early adopter, we recommend this product update for your evaluation.
    • Modular Licensing. We now offer Modular Licensing, which allows you the flexibility to license PrizmDoc components separately. This provides you with the ability to add new use cases and feature-specific modules to your installation as they become available.
    • IMPORTANT: New License Required for v14.0. If you are an existing customer, you will need to get a new license to use v14.0. To obtain a v14.0 license, contact info@accusoft.com.

    Security

    • PrizmDoc Application Services (PAS) Security Improved. Eliminated the use of the Accusoft-Secret header and the secretKey configuration option in PrizmDoc Application Services (PAS). Privileged requests that previously required the use of the header no longer validate it. This change was made with the expectation that recommended best security practices dictate that no privileged service APIs should be exposed as publicly accessible and this validation is therefore unnecessary.
    • PrizmDoc Application Services (PAS) Security Improved. Eliminated the acceptBadSslCertificate parameter in the viewingSession and viewingPackageCreators APIs and added a new configuration file property, viewing.validateTlsCertificates which now makes this functionality configurable only by a server administrator and makes TLS certificate validation for remote downloads required by default.

    14.0 Product Updates and Fixes

    Deprecation Notices

    • We are announcing the deprecation of Affinity tokens with the v14.0 release. We are moving towards eliminating the local cached data that makes server affinity necessary. Support for affinity tokens will be removed in a future release.
    • We previously announced the deprecation of the "v3" viewing package REST APIs in the v13.26 release. The "v3" viewing package REST APIs will be be removed in a future release.
    • We previously announced the deprecation of the addMarkFromSearchResult method (in v13.26 Release) and the convertToHighlight and convertToRedaction methods (in the v13.16 release). These Viewer Control API endpoints will be removed in a future release.
    • We previously announced the deprecation of the Local File Viewer. The Local File Viewer will be removed from the Client installer in a future release.

    Future Breaking Changes

    To provide transparency and assist you in planning for future changes that may affect you, we are listing items that are considered breaking changes in a future release. NOTE: These changes are not in v14.0.

    • The MarkCreated, MarkChanged, and MarkRemoved events will be updated to no longer trigger while markup is loading in a future release. You should avoid depending on these events firing before the markup is finished loading.
    • Currently OCRing documents that contain a raster and vector content will produce an OCRed document that contains only the raster content. This behavior is confusing and counterintuitive, so the OCR process will be updated to return an error instead in a future release.
    • We will be standardizing and improving the detail of the HTTP status codes that our PrizmDoc and PAS REST API endpoints return in the case of an error. The specific error status codes currently returned by some endpoints may change in a future release.
    • We will be defaulting to multi-server/cluster mode in order to reduce friction and improve scalability in a future release.
    • We will be dropping support for older formats generated by document pre-conversion in order to reduce time and resource usage in a future release.
    • Use of a Central Database for PrizmDoc will be required in a future release in order to move towards eliminating server affinity.
    • The default value for security.externalContent.requireHttps will be changed to the more secure setting of true in a future release. Setting this option to true will be allowed when using the MSO rendering engine, but you will still need to handle blocking non-HTTPS requests outside of PrizmDoc.
    • The default value for fileTypes.excel.formulas.autocalculate.enabled will be changed to the more secure setting of false in a future release.
    • The default value for security.htmlRendering.blockExternalContent will be changed to the more secure setting of true in a future release.
    • The default value for viewing.sessionConstraints.documentSource.allowedValues will be changed to the more secure setting of [api] in a future release.

    Product Updates

    14.0 Documentation Updates

    Updated Content

    Known Issues

    The following items are either currently under investigation by the Accusoft Engineering organization or provide further information regarding PrizmDoc. Should you require an updated status on any of these items, please contact Accusoft Customer Support.

    Installation and Upgrade Issues

    • Currently, the path PrizmDoc is installed to on Windows cannot exceed 64 characters total. Longer paths are rejected by the installer.
    • When installing PrizmDoc on Windows, the account used to start the PrizmDoc service requires a password to be defined. Without a password, the Installer will not be able to proceed.
    • The ext3 file system limits the number of subdirectories within a single directory to 31,998. Because PrizmDoc creates a directory for each viewing session and/or work file, systems with high traffic combined with longer cache expiration periods may encounter request errors with ERROR_GEN_FAILURE. The ext3 file system is the default for ephemeral drives in AWS as well as many current Linux distributions. Consequently, the possibility of encountering this error exists for these systems unless ext4 was specifically chosen at installation. To enable directories containing greater than the 32K subdirectory limit, ext4 turns on HTree indexes (a specialized version of a B-tree) by default. For systems with extraordinarily high traffic coupled with extended cache expiration times, it is recommended the product be installed on Linux systems with ext4 file systems or at least to configure caching to utilize an ext4 file system.
    • If you are using Viewing Packages in PAS and upgrading from a version prior to 13.1, you must upgrade your database schema. See the setting up your database topic for more information on how to upgrade PAS.
    • PrizmDoc relies on a fontconfig package that is not shipped with the product and that might be missing from some distributions of Ubuntu. This was resolved by adding automated checks in the PrizmDoc 13.0 installation scripts. As a workaround for older versions of PrizmDoc, we recommend installing the fontconfig package manually by using sudo apt-get install fontconfig.
    • You must have Microsoft Office installed on the server when using the Microsoft Office Conversion license. If you do not have Microsoft Office installed, you will get an error when converting Office documents or displaying them in the Viewer.
    • Always keep your PrizmDoc Windows server updated with the latest Windows and MS Office updates when using the MSO rendering option. If you don't have the latest updates, you may see rendering issues.
    • When updating to the latest PrizmDoc Server Docker image, existing markup files for CSV and HTML files may require updating.

    Browser-Specific Issues

    • The Safari browser may truncate long file names (containing 96 or more ASCII characters or 27 or more non-ASCII characters) when downloading source files from PrizmDoc viewer. This issue only exists when connecting to PrizmDoc via http/1.1 protocol (with or without https). Setting up an http/2 proxy in front of the PrizmDoc avoids the issue. See also the Safari bug report 47914517.
    • If you print large documents (100+ pages) from the Viewer, you may run into browser memory constraints that are beyond our control. We recommend downloading large documents as a PDF and then printing them.
    • When printing a document in Firefox or Safari, embedded images may be truncated or missing in some cases.
    • When printing a document in Chrome, images may be printed with a black background when the background should be transparent.
    • When printing documents with the Viewer in the Safari browser on Windows, blank pages are sometimes created, causing extra pages in the document.

    PDF Issues

    • Border of graphic elements may not render for specific PDF documents.
    • Starting from 13.6 release some PDF documents may render slightly shifted compared to previous versions of PrizmDoc.
    • Raster images using CMYK colorspace in PDF documents may be rendered with a slightly different color.
    • Currently, burning markup into PDF documents that contain XFA fields is unsupported. Attempting to burn markup into XFA documents will result in an error.
    • Burning markup into PDF documents that contain AcroForm fields is unsupported. Attempting to burn AcroForm fields in PDF documents will leave those field values unchanged.
    • PDF files with embedded raster images in the Indexed color space using CMYK palette might not display with the correct colors in the Viewing Client after conversion to SVG.
    • Search results returned in the Viewing Client for PDF documents may not be highlighted in cases where the PDF contains image over text results. In this case, content will be returned in the Search results tab, but the highlighted search terms will not be displayed in the page view when navigating to the appropriate page. In this case, a message will be displayed indicating that the page does not support text highlighting. This will be improved in future versions.
    • PrizmDoc does not currently perform text extraction and search on AcroForm fields content in PDF documents.
    • PrizmDoc does not currently perform text-extraction and search on PDF annotation markup within PDF documents. This annotation markup includes Text and FreeText annotation types as specified in the PDF reference guide.
    • PrizmDoc does not support rendering of Dynamic XFA (XML Forms Architecture) PDF forms. Instead of the actual forms content, a message such as "Please wait... If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document." will be displayed.
    • If the PDFPS microservice exceeds the open file descriptor limit, then PrizmDoc will restart the PDFPS microservice.
    • CMYK JPEG files may display as negative (or inverted) color images when converted to PDF or raster formats.
    • Deep Image Redaction may not work as expected when the source PDF contains G32D encoded TIFF images. PDF redactions will be created but any content on the G32D encoded content intended for redaction will not be obscured by black pixel data.
    • When converting HTML to PDF using the Content Conversion Service, you may see poor performance on larger documents when pdfOptions.forceOneFilePerPage is set to true. We recommend that pdfOptions.forceOneFilePerPage be set to false when converting more than 20 pages.

    CAD Issues

    • Embedded OLE objects in CAD files are not currently supported for rendering.
    • Watermarking is not supported for CAD files.
    • The MarkupBurner, responsible for the underlying process of annotation, redaction and e-signature, does not currently support CAD based files.

    Office Issues

    • Excel files may take more time to process when using PrizmDoc Server with Microsoft Office version 2019. Increased processing time depends on the source document content, and may take up to three times longer compared to Excel conversion performed by Microsoft Office version 2016.
    • Word files may take more time to process when using PrizmDoc Server with Microsoft Office version 2021. Increased processing time depends on the source document content, and may take up to three times longer compared to Word conversion performed by Microsoft Office version 2016 and two times longer compared to Word conversion performed by Microsoft Office version 2019.
    • The Document Compare feature is designed for comparing different revisions originating from the same MS Word document. Using this feature for comparing any random MS Word documents is not recommended and may lead to unexpected results.
    • Internal hyperlinks (like TOC bookmarks) within Office documents are not clickable when rendered or converted to PDF with the use of the Microsoft Office Conversion option.
    • The following TTC font packages on Ubuntu might conflict with Tunga and Latha font substitution implemented in PrizmDoc Office Converter causing inaccurate rendering. You may need to uninstall those packages for better font substitution fidelity:
      • fonts-gubbi
      • ttf-indic-fonts-core
      • ttf-bengali-fonts
      • ttf-devanagari-fonts
      • ttf-gujarati-fonts
      • ttf-kannada-fonts
      • ttf-malayalam-fonts
      • ttf-oriya-fonts
      • ttf-punjabi-fonts
      • ttf-tamil-fonts
      • ttf-telugu-fonts
    • Excel worksheets will now be rendered with grid lines, headers, footers, and hidden content visible by default causing the existing annotation and redaction markup to be not aligned with the old rendering content. Customers wanting to redact the new output would need to re-create annotation and redaction markups. Customers wanting to go back to the old style rendering can do that by changing the Excel rendering properties available in the central configuration file.
    • Excel pagination causes the Office converter to generate more pages. This puts more stress on the server and may cause the conversion to timeout.
    • Certain VML shapes from Word documents might not render properly to the client viewers.

    E-Signature Issues

    • With some browsers the E-Signature Viewing Client performance could be impacted when the number of fields in the document is more than 1,300.
    • There are known issues with E-Signing when working on iOS devices that can cause the screen to move erratically when moving from field to field. This does not keep the experience from being usable, but it can be disconcerting while using.

    Annotation and Redaction Issues

    • There are known limitations when trying to use Quick Actions to redact large search result sets that are over hundreds of results.
    • Note that we have modified the default properties for several marks when creating them via the API. As long as you are setting mark properties, such as color and line width, this should not affect your code.
    • There are limitations to using the Full-Page Redactions mouse tool on a mobile device.
    • The Email Conversion Service fidelity improvements will result in shifting the rendered content (due to inline image rendering support for more accurate rendering of the HTML body) and making the existing annotation and redaction markup not aligned with the old rendered content. Customers wanting to redact the new output would need to re-create the annotation and redaction markups.
    • There are some special symbols, such as '@', that cannot be properly processed in auto-redaction.
    • Burned annotations are shifted on PDF files with a non-standard PDF page Cropbox or Mediabox boxes.

    Miscellaneous Viewer Issues

    • When requesting raster page content, a '500' error may appear in the network log. As part of performance improvements, the Viewer now always requests SVG content first. If SVG content is not available, a '500' error will be communicated and the client will then request raster content. Although this does not negatively affect the Viewer behavior, this will be changed in a future release to handle the request differently.
    • It is recommended that the document cache be cleared prior to upgrading PrizmDoc. Failure to clear the cache will result in the inability to search documents in the Viewer that have been cached in prior versions of PrizmDoc.
    • PrizmDoc does not currently provide full support for searching and extracting text which reads from right-to-left (like Arabic and Hebrew), which may cause the search and text extraction results to display such text in wrong left-to-right direction.
    • If you print large documents (100+ pages) from the Viewer, you may run into browser memory constraints that are beyond our control. We recommend downloading large documents as a PDF and then printing them.
    • Watermarks appear in bold and are not transparent.
    • You may see space between the image tiles (when rendering raster images that are broken into tiles, within HTML tables) if those tables do not fit into one page.
    • HTML conversion on Windows depends on system DPI. Higher system DPI results in smaller HTML content size when viewing HTML.
    • When printing from within the Viewer using a browser, you will have to manually set the page orientation and page size in the system's Print Dialog, even when a particular orientation and/or page size has been set within the Viewer.

    Content Conversion Service Issues

    • The Content Conversion Service does not support conversion of DICOM files to a searchable PDF document format.
    • The Content Conversion Service does not support conversion of transparent TIFF files to a searchable PDF document format.
    • The Content Conversion Service's feature that performs optical character recognition (OCR) to convert a raster file to a searchable PDF document does not support CentOS 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platforms.

    Miscellaneous Server Issues

    • POST /v2/viewingPackageCreators may fail if the request body properties input.source.fileName, input.source.displayName, or input.source.downloadName use unicode characters outside of the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane.
    • All Server-Side configurations should be identical across all the servers in a cluster because documents are frequently sent to a random server for processing. This also applies for the multi-server Microsoft Office Conversion configuration that now supports connectivity to PrizmDoc Servers running on Linux.
    • The POST /v2/searchContexts/{contextId}/completed URL should not have a body. Though the request may still succeed if a body is used in the v12.2 release, it can begin to fail in the future. Using any body with this request should be avoided.
    • The PrizmDoc Server "GET Page" call requesting a JPEG thumbnail for a certain page hosted on Windows might return HTTP error 500.
    • Abandoned Viewing Sessions - The text extraction process will continue if a user abandons a session before the text extraction process completes. This will be improved in a future release, but it is important to know that a user abandoning a document does not necessarily release conversion resources on the server.

     

     

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