Why isn't there a thumbnail for my document

Submitted by Joe Prevo on Wed, 01/14/2015 - 13:33

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TechDoc Search Manager Questions

People have asked us why a thumbnail doesn't appear in the search results for a particular document on an SM. Here are the reasons why TechDoc cannot or will not display a thumbnail on an SM for some documents:

  1. The file type of the document may not be supported. TechDoc must have support for each specific file type in order to produce a thumbnail for a file. As of TechDoc 8, the following file types are supported for thumbnails: BMP, CUR, DOC, DOCX, DOTX, EMF, GIF, ICO, JPE, JPEG, JPG, MPP, PDF, PICT, PNG, PNM, POTM, POTX, PPM, PPS, PPSM, PPSX, PPT, PPTM, PPTX, SVG, TIF, TIFF, VSDM, VSDX, VSSM, VSSX, VSTM, VSTX, WBMP, WMF, XLS, XLSB, XLSM, XLSX, and XLTM.
  2. The file may not have a thumbnail enabled. For certain file formats like Microsoft Office, the user can tell Office whether to produce a thumbnail for a specific document or not. If an Office document does not have thumbnails enabled, TechDoc will not be able to display one.
  3. The file may have protection that prevents TechDoc from accessing the thumbnail or accessing the contents to produce a thumbnail. Microsoft Office and PDF file formats support encryption that requires a password to access the contents of a file. For files protected this way, TechDoc cannot bypass the security to access the file so no thumbnail will be produced.
  4. A thumbnail will not be sent to an SM unless the DM is configured to send thumbnails to that SM. To check this, an Admin can go to the Admin screen and click on "SM Hosts" under "Show..." Look under the "Send Thumbnails" column to make sure that it is set to "Yes" for the SM in question.
  5. A thumbnail will not be displayed if a document has not been released yet.
  6. A thumbnail will not be displayed if a document does not permit anonymous read access at the same level as the SM that the search is being performed on. For example, if the document is submitted to a Community SM, the document must have Community read assigned to the document. Otherwise, someone searching on the document could see a small version of the first page of a file even though they might not have permission to read it at all.
  7. A thumbnail will not be displayed if the latest released generation of the document is set to restricted fetch access. Restricted fetch access on a generation says that no anonymous read is allowed on this particular generation of the document so the thumbnail will not be displayed.
  8. A thumbnail will not be displayed if the document is set to a Doc Category that requires encryption and the SM is a non-pooling SM.
  9. A thumbnail will not be displayed if the specific thumbnail library for the appropriate file type encounters an error while trying to extract or create the thumbnail. This can be caused by a problem in the file itself, the version of file being too old or too new for the thumbnail library to handle, etc. If this happens, a thumbnail exception will be written to the TechDoc log on the DM at the time the document metadata is being generated and sent to the SM. The rest of the metadata will still be sent to the SM but no thumbnail will be present in the metadata.