Assignment Interface - PDF renders of submission not showing.

Assignment Interface - PDF renders of submission not showing.

by Neil Kay -
Number of replies: 2
Hi All,

I am running Moodle 4.3.2 on Debian 11 and have Ghostscript, Poppler, PDFtoppm and python, and OpenJDK all setup and paths verified.

I have installed Libreoffice (latest) and Unoconv (via git), and the unoconv path verifies + I can render and see the converted test file (via the unoconv setup/test page) + I have run the conversions on the command line using a test .docx files and have generated valid PDFs, so I think all's in place to render submissions to PDFs.

I also have unoconv setup as a service on the server, and systemctl status shows it's running. 

However...

When I go to grade submissions, I either do or don't get a PDF panel, and if I do get a panel it's always empty. I am unsure whether I understand how the grading page should work:

  • If students are given the option to fill in their submission using their Web interface directly into a text field, I can see this in the right panel on the grading page, but should it also render as a PDF? This is what I see. It also looks like the top of the PDF is cut off?...
Text box submission example.

If I annotate this empty PDF and grade the work, the student (i.e.: me), does receive a PDF with the annotations - but the PDF is otherwise still blank.

  • If I attach a docx to my submission, the grading page changes as below (centered on screen). I see the submission as an attachment in the Grading panel, but no PDF panel at all:
Submission of docx file

Should I be seeing rendered PDFs ready for annotation in both cases, or do I need to set/check something else.

Any suggestions and feedback is much appreciated.

Thanks.




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In reply to Neil Kay

Re: Assignment Interface - PDF renders of submission not showing.

by Neil Kay -
Update: The absolute latest student submissions ARE rendered as PDFs. On the assumption that I did manage to get things working a while back, is it likely that the rendering system just won't do submissions retrospectively?

Any way to trigger the rendering of older submissions?
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In reply to Neil Kay

Re: Assignment Interface - PDF renders of submission not showing.

by Michael Hughes -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
As far as we're aware (and we've delved in to the whole code chain), there is no way to retrospectively trigger the generation of the PDF versions from the student submission.

We found a way to "trick" it into happening by deleting specific database records in the files table (I don't have the exact details to hand) but this in our view is a *very* sketchy way to initiate this, and would like to see some sort of UI element (even it it capability controlled so *not* all users can do it) to "force" the regeneration.

As I said we did find some file records that seem to trigger it, so "in principle" we should be able to do this, we just haven't had the time to pick it up. *If there is a better* trigger for doing this we'd be open to those suggestions, but trying to understand the whole process with document converters, and then ghostscript and pages and images of pages and unstitiching PDFs made our brains really hurt sad
Average of ratings: Useful (1)