Office Previews

Healdan converts Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OpenDocument files to PDF with LibreOffice, which is in the Docker image, for their previews and thumbnails. There’s nothing to switch on. Previews in the User Guide covers what people see.

How It Works

• In the background. Each new file or file version is queued when it’s filed, and converted one at a time. Previews are usually ready within a minute.
• Files already in Healdan, from before previews were added, are converted in the background after the upgrade, newest first, alongside new uploads.
• On the spot. If someone opens a preview before its turn, it’s converted then.
• Safely. Conversion never runs a document’s macros and never fetches anything over the network.
• Permissions are those of PDF previews: Read and Download.

When a Preview Says “Not Available”

A damaged or password-protected file can’t be converted, and its preview says “not available”. It doesn’t hold up other files. To find out why a file failed, search the log, repository/logs/dms.log, for LibreOffice or com.logicaldoc.healdan.preview.

Files That Keep Timing Out

A conversion is stopped after 120 seconds. After a file version first times out, its previews say “not available” straight away, and Healdan gives up on it after four tries.

To try again with a longer limit, raise converter.OfficeConverter.timeout (in seconds) in the configuration volume’s context.properties, and restart. Healdan then gives each version that timed out under the shorter limit one more try. Replacing a version’s file also starts its conversion over.

What Runs in the Install manual has the details.