PDF thumbs not generating

Hi mcook_au,

Let’s address the second part first as it should be an easy fix. If you have installed GS, Document Gallery will look for it, but sometimes it can’t find it and you have to help it out. To manually give the path to the executable, simply go to Dashboard -> Settings -> Document Gallery -> Advanced and fill in the Ghostscript path field. It should work following that. Also, if you tell me what the GS path is on your IIS system, I may be able to use that to enhance how DG finds the executable. Also, is the executable located in a default location or did you manually specify a different location?

For the first question regarding Google Docs, are you per chance running on a local network? Google Docs relies on having a publicly accessible URL to pass Google. If you’re on a local network the path to the document will only make sense within your network and Google won’t know what to do with it. If that’s not the case, can you enable logging (again at Dashboard -> Settings -> Document Gallery -> Advanced) then upload a new document to test and navigate to the gallery where you expect the document to be displayed. Following this, go to the Document Gallery logs Dashboard -> Settings -> Document Gallery -> Logging and filter on Warnings and look for anything that mentions Google. If you paste that error here I may have a better idea what you’re running into.

-Dan

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Hi Dan,

Thanks for that. Providing the full path allowed it to detect gs. My path is “x:\Program Files (x86)\gs\gs9.15\bin”. (Where x = a drive letter).

However, the thumbs are still not generating.

The first time I rendered the page after the plugin was detected and enabled, “array () array ()” etc appeared above the set of icons (with one “array () ” for each document).

On previous days, the log wasn’t generating any warnings or errors, but now it is – sometimes. I am sometimes getting “Ghostscript failed: 1” errors, but generally I’m just getting “detail” messages.

The site is not currently providing publicly accessible URLs, so that would explain why the Google Docs support isn’t working. I am also now sometimes getting “Failed to retrieve thumbnail from Google: Not Found” warnings.

Regards,

mcook_au

Interesting…

So the first thing I would like to test is using Ghostscript on its own. I’d like to isolate what exactly Ghostscript doesn’t like first — outside of PHP. To do that, we need to run the following:
gs -sDEVICE=png16m -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dPDFFitPage -sOutputFile=output.png input.pdf
(replace gs with the path to the gs executable, output.png with where you want the generated thumbnail to go, and input.pdf where the PDF you’re generating a thumbnail from is located)

I’m assuming the above will fail. My hope is that it will provide some details as to why it doesn’t like the command. That is exactly what Document Gallery uses.

With the “array” output, I’m not immediately sure why that would be happening. Is this on a page I can access to investigate? If not, can you save that HTML and upload it to somewhere I can grab it (maybe Dropbox or Pastebin)?

-Dan

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The appropriate binary in this case is gswin32.exe. Using the string given on the command line works fine – a PNG of a PDF is created.

With the “array() ” generation, it only occurs the first time after the images are generated, not when they are pulled from the Document Gallery cache. Deleting the cache items causes it to occur again.

I’ve emailed you a Pastebin location.

A thought… When you manually put the path, did you put what you pasted above “x:\Program Files (x86)\gs\gs9.15\bin” or did you include the exe name in that path “x:\Program Files (x86)\gs\gs9.15\bin\gswin32.exe”? Document Gallery is expecting the full path to the exe, which includes the actual exe name. If that last part is missing then it’s going to be trying to execute a directory, which won’t end well.

Also, replied to the email. It looks like the paste you linked is private.

-Dan

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Thanks Dan. You are right.

I hadn’t put the full path to the binary in, just the folder name. As this made the settings page return “GhostScript detected,” I thought this was the correct syntax.

Entering the full path, clearing the thumb cache and re-rendering the page created the thumbs correctly.

Matt

Perfect!

Yeah, the logic that determines whether GS is “correctly detected” is extremely naive. It just looks at whether it has some non-empty string. This is good in the “normal” case where DG successfully finds the executable on its own, but not so great in cases like this.

-Dan

PS: If you’ve found this plugin useful, please take a moment to rate it. Thanks! ??