PDF won’t render thumbnail

Good to hear from you again, and thanks for the question. Thanks as well for the link to your example; very helpful.

I downloaded a copy of the “Sant’s Greenhouse Case Study” PDF to my system and uploaded it to my development site. The thumbnail image was generated without errors and displays in a gallery as a thumbnail.

On your system, does the thumbnail show up on the Media/Assistant submenu table? If not, you may have a configuration problem on your new server. You can check your configuration by navigating to the Settings/Media Library Assistant Shortcodes tab and scrolling down to the “Thumbnail Substitution Support, mla_viewer” section. If you see something like “WARNING: MLA Viewer support may not be available:” followed by “Ghostscript support is not installed.” or “Imagick support is not installed.”, there’s a configuration problem. You will have to work with your hosting provider to resolve the problems.

You can also try the thumbnail generation experiment outlined in this earlier topic:

One PDF thumbnail not showing after replacing with new PDF

I will leave this topic unresolved until I hear back from you on the results of your configuration check. Any additional information you can provide will be helpful.

Thanx for your reply,

The thumbnail is NOT rendering in the library. I am only getting the standard Acrobat icon.

Nick

I checked and “Ghostscript support is not installed.” I reached out to my server.

Thanks for your updates and for checking out the Ghostscript support.

Once you get the server configured with the proper support you can use MLA’s thumbnail generation feature (described in the earlier post I linked to above) to add thumbnails to the PDF(s) you have uploaded to the new server.

I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any problems or further questions regarding the thumbnail generation progress. Thanks for your continued interest in the plugin.

Hey David,

Great plugin!

I have a similar problem with support for Ghostscript. On the shortcodes tab I get the “Ghostscript support is not installed” warning.

I talked to my web hosting provider. And they confirmed that imagemagick and ghostscript are installed.

I checked if imagemagick supports pdf via phpinfo() and that was also true.

Can you help me debug this problem? Would the way wordpress is installed on the server effect they way in which the plugin calls on ghostcript?

Mark

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by amoras.

@amoras –

Thanks for the positive feedback and for your report. Since you’ve been assured that Ghostscript is installed, the problem might be that it is installed in a way MLA does not expect.

What kind of problem are you having, e.g., is it MLA-specific and if so, how? Does WordPress successfully generate thumbnail images for PDF documents when they are uploaded?

If you can access your site’s error log, you can activate some MLA debug logging to get more information about how the detection process is failing. Here’s an outline of how to proceed:

1. Navigate to the Settings/Media Library Assistant Debug tab.
2. Scroll down to the “MLA Reporting” text box and enter “0x09”. This will turn on MLA debug logging for the Ghostscript detection process.
3. Click the Save Changes button to record your new setting.
4. Optionally, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click “Reset” to clear the error log. You may not want to do this depending on how you manage your error log.

Once that’s done you can run the test. The debug log might be very detailed, so restricting the test as best you can will be very helpful. To reproduce your issue I think you can simply visit the Settings/Media Library Assistant Shortcodes tab and then collect the test results.

When you’ve finished testing, go back to the Debug screen and:

1. Enter “0” in the MLA Reporting text box to turn debug logic off.
2. Click the Save Changes button to record your new setting.
3. Scroll to the bottom and click “Download” to get the log content in a text file.

There can be a lot of messages written to the log, so limit the amount of activity during the logging period. You should see messages in the log like these:

[26-Oct-2020 00:04:19 UTC] 640 MLACore::mla_plugins_loaded_action() MLA 2.84 (20201023) mla_debug_level 0x9
[26-Oct-2020 00:04:19 UTC] MLAShortcode_Support::mla_ghostscript_present( 1 ) explicit_path = ''
[26-Oct-2020 00:04:19 UTC] MLAShortcode_Support::mla_ghostscript_present( 1 ) ghostscript_present = NULL
[26-Oct-2020 00:04:19 UTC] <strong>MLAShortcode_Support::mla_ghostscript_present</strong>, getenv(GSC) = false
[26-Oct-2020 00:04:20 UTC] <strong>MLAShortcode_Support::mla_ghostscript_present</strong>,  exec(where gswin*c.exe) = ''
[26-Oct-2020 00:04:20 UTC] <strong>MLAShortcode_Support::mla_ghostscript_present</strong>,  exec(dir /o:n/s/b "C:\Program Files\gs\*gswin*c.exe") = 'C:\\Program Files\\gs\\gs9.20\\bin\\gswin64c.exe'

Of course, the details will be different. You might be able to spot the problem and resolve it on your own or with your hosting support group. If you need more assistance from me, you can post the interesting messages in this topic. You can also email me the information if that’s better for you. You can contact me at my web site to continue the dialog.