First, check that the client machine is set up correctly to support PDF highlighting. To check, click this link both in Internet Explorer and in Firefox:
If hit highlighting does not work, please see Troubleshooting steps.
If PDF highlighting works when you click the link above but not in your application,
(A) Check the URLs that your application generates
Check that the URLs your application generates have the right format. The format for the URLs that provide hit highlighting information is:
https://www.example.com/sample.pdf#xml=https://www.example.com/hits.xml
The #xml= portion of the link points to a URL that returns an XML stream describing the location of the hits in the PDF file.
(B) Check the IsPdfHighlighter protocol
Check that the script that handles highlighting requests handles the IsPdfHighlighter protocol. To prevent use of the plug-in to send forged requests to web sites, the plug-in will send a standard validation request to make sure the target URL is really a PDF search highlighter. The validation request replaces the query in the original URL with "IsPdfHighlighter", and expects a response that contains "YesPdfHighlighter".
For example, suppose a user clicks this link:
https://www.example.com/harmless.pdf#xml=https://www.example.com/gethits.aspx?search=123456
Adobe Reader will open the PDF file, and the dtSearch plug-in will see the #xml= in the URL. To verify the target URL, before requesting the highlighting data, the dtSearch plug-in will first send this request:
https://www.example.com/gethits.aspx?IsPdfHighlighter
To test your script, you can enter the URL for your highlighting script in a browser window with the IsPdfHighlighter request added and check that the response includes YesPdfHighlighter.
(C) Generate a diagnostic log on a client machine where highlighting does not work
To generate a diagnostic log:
(1) Click Start > Programs > dtSearch Pdf Search Highlighter > dtSearch PDF Search Highlighter Options to open the configuration program for the highlighter.
(2) Click Diagnostics... and check the box to Enable diagnostic logging to create a text log file of the highlighting process.
(3) Try to open a PDF file that should have highlighting.
(4) Close all browser windows and all Adobe Reader windows
(5) In the dtSearch PDF Search Highlighter Options program, click Zip logs for email to find the diagnostic logs.
The plug-in creates a log named dtSearch_WebHitsPlugin*.log. If the log is not present in the ZIP file, make sure you closed all Adobe Reader and browser windows before clicking the Zip logs for email button (an open Adobe Reader instance will keep the log file locked).
In the diagnostic log:
- Check that the URL detected in the log includes the #xml= syntax. If you do not see the #xml= syntax in the log, either your application may not be generating the #xml= links, or, if you are using Internet Explorer, then the dtSearch PDF Search Highlighter BHO may be disabled in Internet Explorer (see Troubleshooting steps).
- Check for any error messages recorded in the log identify any security issues that prevented highlighting from working.
- Check that the IsPdfHighlighter query was processed correctly with a response that includes "YesPdfHighlighter"
- Check that the XML your application returns is correctly formatted and does not include any extra content such as HTML headers or messages.
