Liquent InSight Rendering 4.4 Administration

Source Document Considerations

Before submitting job tickets to create renditions of your source documents, consider the following regarding your source documents.

Microsoft Excel Documents

When rendering Excel documents to HTML, sometimes the Excel plug-in generates a hidden error dialog warning that the data conversion feature will not be saved in the HTML file. BusinessServiceRender does not properly handle this dialog and the rendition job fails.

When printing an Excel file containing multiple sheets, you can print page numbers in the header or footer in sequential order across all the sheets in the workbook. However, the rendered output of the same workbook results in the page numbers starting over for each sheet. With InSight Rendering, you can render an entire workbook, but the pagination is not preserved in the PDF output.

InSight Rendering does not process password-protected documents created using applications other than Word. For example, it does not process password-protected sheets in a Microsoft Excel workbook.

A chart for which Paper size in Excel is set to a value other than Letter, A4, or Tabloid is not resized correctly in Liquent InSight Rendering if all of the following apply:
  • InSight Rendering is running in hide mode. (Applications and dialog boxes are not shown to you during rendering.)
  • On the Excel Transformation dialog box in Liquent InSight Rendering, Paper Orientation is set to a value that does not match the Orientation setting in Excel.
  • On the Excel Transformation dialog box, Page Size is set to Original.

Microsoft Outlook Documents

You cannot render a Microsoft Outlook meeting request if either of the following is true:
  • No Microsoft Exchange accounts have been configured in Outlook on the InSight Rendering server.
  • The calendar entry for the meeting request was deleted after the request was saved.

Microsoft PowerPoint Documents

InSight Rendering does not resolve hyperlinks in PowerPoint documents.

Microsoft Project Documents

Microsoft Project renditions might contain more pages than you expected from the original source document. This is because the pages that are rendered depend on what was displayed in the Microsoft Project window when you last saved the document. To avoid additional pages, save the Microsoft Project source file with only the desired information displayed.

Microsoft Visio Documents

To configure the rendering of Microsoft Visio source documents, you can set Visio transformation options for all documents or options for each document. The transformation options override the options for individual documents.

InSight Rendering might not render a Visio diagram with the number of sheets (tiles) in the width or length that you specify. For example, if you specify two sheets across and two sheets down, InSight Rendering might render the diagram with two sheets across but only one sheet down.

You can configure InSight Rendering to render a Visio document with links. A Visio document can link to:
  • External documents
  • Websites
  • Locations in the source document, if you print all document pages, not just the active page
If a Visio source document has links:
  • In the rendered document, if a link hot spot on two tiles is divided by a page break between the tiles, then each tile has part of the hot spot. 
  • In the rendered document, if the target page of a link is tiled and the page breaks between tiles, the link destination is the first tile.
  • If you resize the rendered page containing the diagrams, the link hot spots can be misaligned.
  • If a Visio object contains multiple links, only the top-most link is rendered.
  • If a Visio object that contains a link has child objects that contain links, only the link from the parent object is rendered.
  • If a link hot spot is an entire Visio page, the link is not rendered.
  • If you print only the active page, links to the same document are not rendered.
  • If you set the number of sheets in the width or length of a Visio diagram to 2 but Visio prints the document on one page, the link hot spots in the rendered diagram can be misaligned.

Microsoft Word Documents

InSight Rendering does not render Word source documents that contain the AutoOpen macro fields. Confirm that your Word source documents do not include AutoOpen macro fields before trying to generate PDFs.

You can create a PDF file from a Word document that contains secured or protected fields. However,  Parexel cannot guarantee that any transformation options that you select will work. Word documents that contain secured or protected fields can be successfully rendered to PDF, but features such as bookmarks and links might not work.

InSight Rendering processes password-protected documents created in Word, although it does not process password-protected documents created in other applications.

InSight Rendering can process protected Word documents that require a password to open or change, if all the documents have the same password. InSight Rendering can also process protected Microsoft Word documents that do not require a password.

InSight Rendering renders blank Word documents, that is, Word documents that are either entirely empty, or contain only a header, footer, or image.

Word enables you to create bookmarks to hidden text. If you deactivate hidden text and then render a document, these bookmarks still appear in the rendered document. Consequently, because the hidden text (containing the targets for such bookmarks) is excluded, some or all of the bookmarks can reference the wrong pages.

When using a reference as a field code in a Word document, the reference is rendered by the Render business service as a hyperlink, and the link color matches what is defined for preserved internal TOC links in the Word content type.

To preserve links in shapes in PDF files rendered from .docx documents on systems with Word 2013, configure InSight Rendering to show Word windows during rendering.

InSight Rendering cannot extract any character from an equation object in a Word source document. An equation object does not appear in a bookmark in a PDF document rendered from a Word document.

If you render a Microsoft Word .doc document created in Word 2007 or earlier, some characters can be rendered in a different font size and unbolded characters can be bolded in the output PDF document. If you encounter either of these errors, save the document in the .docx format or resave it in Word 2013. Then render it again to produce a rendition without the error.

Password-Protected Documents from Applications Other Than Microsoft Word

InSight Rendering does not process password-protected documents created by using applications other than Word. For example, it does not process sheets in an Excel workbook or a PowerPoint document.

If you try to render a password-protected PowerPoint document, the rendering process times out and you cannot render any other PowerPoint document until you close and reopen PowerPoint.

Files Other than Microsoft Office Files

If you render a file other than a Microsoft Office file from the file system to PDF, the properties of the PDF file might be different from the properties of the source file.

Text Documents

If a text file source document contains a tab, the rendered document might look different from the source document. The application used to view the rendered document might replace the tab with a number of spaces. Consequently, some text on the line that has the tab might exceed the right margin and even be truncated. To prevent this, set a text transformation option to substitute a space for a tab.

Use of the Less-Than Sign (<) and the Greater-Than Sign (>)

In a cover page or overlay, do not use the less-than sign or the greater-than sign, except to enclose variables. Using these characters for any other purpose can cause undesired results.