Question

Office plug-in corrupts PDF when creating a new version from Word

Laserfiche

Updated March 11, 2015

asked on March 11, 2015 • Show version history

We have a series of users that place Word documents in Laserfiche. They then edit them keeping versions of those Word documents in Laserfiche, everything seems to be working fine with this part of the process. Once they are finished editing the Word document and are ready to submit the proposal to the client they open up the Word document, they then select the Laserfiche tab, Laserfiche icon, and select new document. From the new document dialog box they select PDF instead of DOCX and they save the PDF into Laserfiche. The PDF that is saved works fine and opens fine.

The issue occurs when they need to make a change to the proposal and create new version of the PDF. They again open the Word document and make their changes, they then select the Laserfiche tab, Laserfiche icon, and select new document. Laserfiche at this point asks them if they want to create a new document with a rename or if they want to create a new new version of the file. They say new version and then select okay and it looks like it finishes fine without error, but the PDF file that is saved to the system does not work and it is corrupted. We get the following errors when trying to open it.

Office version 2013

Laserfiche Client 9.2.0.343

I have tried this on two different machines and it happens on both. The second one was running Office 2007 and LF Client 9.2.0.343

John

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replied on March 11, 2015 • Show version history

Thanks for reporting this issue. When saving the Word document as a new PDF document, using the same name as an existing PDF, and then choosing to import as a new version of that PDF, it actually results in the document getting saved back as a Word document, but essentially disguised as a PDF, i.e. using the PDF extension and mime type. If you export that corrupt electronic document back out to Windows, rename the extension from pdf to docx, then it will open fine in Word.

Could the situation be worked around by saving the final version of the Word document as a new PDF instead of as a new version of an existing PDF? Would they need to retain the version(s) of the PDF prior to the new final version if the Word document itself was already versioned and still in the repository?

We'll update this thread when more information is available.

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replied on March 11, 2015

Alex,

We are currently asking them to just overwrite the existing PDF without version tracking as you mentioned above. Although I have been asked by the customer find out about a fix so they can save version tracked PDFs this way. I also explained that if this is required right now they could save the Word document out as a PDF to their desktop and drag it in each time. When they drag the second version in it would ask about version tracking as long as the name matches and they drag to the same folder. They weren't totally pleased about the extra steps but agreed that it will get them through until the issue could be addressed.

John

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replied on March 11, 2015

We have this identical issue. In our case, the reason we need to overwrite the original PDF is to keep the document ID # the same as ultimately it gets tied into our website by a static URL.

We ended up having them save the pdf to a network drive and having QuickFields Agent or Import Agent take it back into Laserfiche to overwrite the original entry ID and keep that # the same.

Would love to hear a more elegant way!

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replied on March 11, 2015

Thanks for reporting your use case. In terms of working around this issue and also retaining the entry ID of the PDF, what you're doing now is probably as good as anything else.

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Office plug-in corrupts PDF when creating a new version from Word

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