TI Viewer FAQ

Question: I'm seeing issues with rendering .MSG files. What can I do?

Answer: There are several options. .MSG (message) files are a portable email format. This format is not fully standardized, and in many cases metadata may be encoded differently in a non-standard way, depending on which email client originally created it. For this reason, rendering .MSG files are a relatively complex feature of the TI Viewer, and at times, rendering may fail and may cause a blank PDF. As TI sees rendering issues, we open defects and schedule improvements to this capability in upcoming patches.

In the interim, the following workarounds are available:

1. For a small number of files, customers can switch over to using the native viewer in TI, which will download the .MSG file to their desktop. From there they can open this file in their local Outlook/Email client and print to PDF using their local PDF print driver. This PDF can then be uploaded directly to the room in place of the original .MSG file.

2. The best solution for a large number of failures is to enable the TI communication inbox feature, released in 9.2. This email rendering works entirely differently from the .MSG file rendering. Instead of converting an .MSG file to PDF, this inbox converts the original email directly to PDF as well as any attachments, and the rendering is simpler and more dependable because the non-standard .MSG format is avoided. There is an approval cycle built into this module as well, allowing you to decide if an email is pertinent to the eTMF or not.

3. If there are large numbers of files and the communication inbox cannot be used for some reason, due to either time constraints or process limitations, TransPerfect can convert .MSG files as well as other email archive formats to PDF as a separate service.

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Question: What is the difference between Acrobat Forms (AcroForms) and XML Forms Architecture (XFA) also know as LiveCycle forms?

Answer: AcroForms is the original PDF forms technology, first introduced in 1998. AcroForms accept input in both Forms Data Format (FDF) and XML Forms Data Format (XFDF).

The TI Viewer supports AcroForms, and only AcroForms is supported in the standard PDF/Archive format required by the FDA and other agencies. Only Adobe Reader / Acrobat currently supports XFA Life Cycle forms.