Technical Notes, Zetafax

FIX: PDF documents do not render correctly

ZTN1409

ID: ZTN1409

This Zetafax technical note applies to:

  • Version 9.0.300 (SP1) and earlier.

Note: this update has been included in Zetafax 9.1 and later

Symptom

When submitting a PDF document to Zetafax, either in a ZSUBMIT file or through the Email Gateway, Epstiff decides to render the document, rather than pass it to Doctiff.  This is characterised in the Zetafax server by the fact the Doctiff is not launched, and that the resulting document is a textual representation of the PDF encoding characters, rather than the PDF document itself.

Cause

This problem only occurs with some PDF documents, and has been commonly reported in situations where the PDF source documents were produced by Xerox scanners.  This problem is caused by the way in which Epstiff identifies PDF documents.

Resolution

An updated version of epstiff.exe has been made to rectify this problem. 

To fix this issue on affected systems you first need to download the following patch:

ftp://ftp.equisys.com/pub/Zetafax9sp1/Beta/Epstiff303.zip

Then work though the following steps.

  1. Stop the Zetafax Server
  2. Logon to the Zetafax Server and browse to the Zfax\SERVER\ where Zfax is the installation folder of the Zetafax server files.
  3. Rename epstiff.exe to epstiff.old
  4. Copy the downloaded file to the above folder and rename to epstiff.exe
  5. Verify that the version number of epstiff.exe in the SERVER folder is now build 9.0.303 or later.
  6. Restart the Zetafax Server

Status

This behaviour has been identified by Equisys as a problem with the above mentioned software version.

References             

`ZTN1301 HOWTO Troubleshooting rendering issues

Last updated 02 November 2005 (LD/EB)

Date published 23rSeptember 2004 (GR/SV)

Keywords < Render> < PDF> < Doctiff>