CFPDF Action = Thumbnails Throws PDFDocException

Report · Jul 26, 2011

We started seeing this yesterday. All of the PDFs that come in from our copier cause CFPDF Action = Thumbnails to fail. Other PDFs (generated by calling CFPDF source="file.doc" or "file.txt") seem to be fine. There's no other information beyond PDFDocException - cfcatch.detail is blank, and the stack trace doesn't appear to be helpful.

Has anyone seen this before? Our process was working fine up until yesterday, and nothing has changed. Scans from the copier used to produce PDFs that worked just fine. I'll be investigating on the copier end today.

Here's a bug in the tracker that looks the same: http://cfbugs.adobe.com/cfbugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html#bugId=75805

And yeah, we've already tried restarting the server. Running CF 9 (standard) on Windows Server 2008 R2.

Edit: Looks like anything that's created by extracting pages from a PDF (using Acrobat X Pro) fails. Stuff from the scanners / copiers is fine, but if someone splits a large scan job out into several PDFs, it fails.

Report · Jul 26, 2011

We can get around this by setting the compatibility on the extracted PDF to 1.4.

If we leave it as-is (it reports 1.6), it doesn't work. Yet the source PDF (which works) reports a compatibility level of 1.6 as well.

If we set it to the highest compatibility option (highest version, least compatible), it still doesn't work, AND it also fails to do a simple read and display to browser.

Bottom line: Acrobat X Pro is creating PDFs that <CFPDF> in Coldfusion 9 can't handle.