PDF files not publishing automatically
In Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), you might encounter an issue where PDFs aren’t automatically published, even though their thumbnails are published. This article explains how to configure AEM to ensure that the PDFs are published.
Description description
Environments
- Dynamic Media Classic
- Adobe Experience Manager
- Adobe Experience Manager 6.5
- Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service
- Adobe Experience Manager Assets
Issue
When uploading PDF files to AEM, the thumbnails are generated and published, but the PDF files themselves aren’t automatically published. This requires a manual step to publish the PDF files, which can be cumbersome and error-prone.
Steps to Reproduce:
- Configure AEM to use Dynamic Media (DM) with settings to publish assets immediately.
- Upload a PDF file into a folder synced to Dynamic Media.
- Observe that while the thumbnail is published automatically, the PDF file itself remains unpublished.
Resolution resolution
Out of the box, PDF files don’t publish by default. The reason is that an image is much smaller than a PDF, so because of bandwidth considerations, the design assumption is to favor serving the smaller JPEG that works almost universally instead of a larger PDF that only works on devices with specific plugins installed. Customers who absolutely need to publish the PDF can still do so, but it isn’t the default behavior.
To ensure that both the PDF files are automatically published in AEM as a Cloud Service, follow these steps:
- Go to AEM
>Tools>Assets>Dynamic Media General Settings. - Then select the PDF tab under Default Upload Options.
- In the Processing dropdown, select None, and save.
This will synchronize your PDF with DM and automatically publish it. The thumbnail won’t be created.
If you need both the PDF and the image to be published on Dynamic Media, this isn’t possible out of the box. You can either have the thumbnail created and published automatically and the PDF synchronized and not published, or you can generate no thumbnail and synchronize and publish the PDF automatically. If you want both published, then you would have to customize this. One suggestion for this would be to check the status of PDF in Dynamic Media, and then create a workflow to trigger a publishing in Dynamic mMedia using IPS API:
https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/dynamic-media-developer-resources/image-production-api/operation-methods/operation-parameters/r-set-asset-publish-state