PDF preview for Rich Text Blocks

You can preview your Rich Text Blocks as PDF documents: when a Rich Text Block is saved, KCM will automatically generate a PDF preview for it. However, if you have upgraded to the latest version or imported a project that had been exported by a previous version of KCM, the older Rich Text Blocks will have no automatically generated PDF previews.

For Rich Text Blocks that have no preview yet, users will get the following message: "Currently, no preview is available for this Text Block. Contact your administrator for more information."

To address this, you can use the CreateRichTextBlockPreviews.exe tool to generate PDF previews whenever you need them. The tool resides in the <deploy root>\KCM\Programs\<version>\Management\Instance folder on the KCM instance. You can execute it manually from the command line or use Windows Task Scheduler to schedule its launch, for example, to off-peak hours.

If one preview is generated at a time, this does not take too much resources, but for a large number of Rich Text Blocks, their immediate processing might affect the KCM Core and KCM Repository performance.

You can instruct the tool to generate PDF previews for the Rich Text Blocks that do not have such preview yet or also include the Rich Text Blocks whose previous preview creation attempts have failed. For that, use the Action!IncludeFailed parameter described below.

The following table lists the parameters for running the tool.

Parameter	Required / Optional	Description
Instance!Number	Required	KCM instance number the tool will operate on.
Repository!User	Optional. Only required when the LDAP mode is disabled.	User account in KCM Designer. This user account needs administrative rights for KCM Repository.
Repository!Password	Optional. Only required when the LDAP mode is disabled.	Password for the KCM Designer user account.
Repository!Token	Optional. Only required when the LDAP mode is enabled.	Logon token generated with KCM Designer.
Action!IncludeFailed	Optional	If set to True – include Rich Text Blocks whose previous preview generation attempts failed. If omitted or set to False (default) – do not include such Rich Text Blocks.
Action!Perform	Optional	If set to True – generate PDF previews for enumerated Rich Text Blocks. If omitted or set to False (default) – do not generate previews, only enumerate Rich Text Blocks.

By default, the tool runs with the Action!Perform parameter set to False and enumerates the Rich Text Blocks that must be included in preview generation.

When you run the tool with Action!Perform set to True, it creates PDF previews for these Rich Text Blocks and lists the results. If generation was a success, you will be able to see the Rich Text Block as a PDF when you select it in KCM Designer or work with the editors.

If users edit Rich Text Blocks at the time the tool is running, this may lead to conflicts in saving their changes or cause the tool to stop with an error. Thus, it is strongly recommended not to start the tool while editing Rich Text Blocks that did not have a PDF preview yet, like those imported from an earlier KCM version.

Note, that Rich Text Blocks can only be edited in Kofax Communications Manager Designer.