Common issues and fixes

Fast answers for the most-reported problems.

"Not authenticated" when trying to download

Your session token expired. Sign out and back in — the app should auto-recover but a manual sign-in guarantees a fresh token.

Export PDF says "Request failed with status code 500"

The merge job on the worker failed. Check the export job status via the mobile toast: if it says "wrapped in <100 bytes", the pages being merged don't have rendered PDFs yet — switch the export mode to All pages which wraps source scans. Otherwise file a ticket and include the project ID and export mode.

Share link opens to a blank page

If the URL bar shows storage.googleapis.com/…, the PDF at the signed URL is either 0 bytes (failed merge) or was uploaded with the wrong content type (older bug, now fixed). Generate a fresh share link — the current merge pipeline sets application/pdf inline so browsers render it correctly.

If the URL bar still shows api.babelpage.com/share/…, the merge job is still running — you're on the auto-refreshing "Preparing" page. Give it up to a minute for long books.

"PDF not yet generated for this page"

You tried to download a page-level PDF for a page that hasn't been translated yet (scan-only projects, or fresh uploads still queued). The Download button now falls back to wrapping the source scan as a PDF automatically — if you're still seeing the error, force-refresh the app to pick up the fix.

Auto-order jumbled the pages

The most common cause: pages don't have printed page numbers in the top or bottom margin (art books, sketch pads, some manga). The detector needs at least a short number in the top 12% or bottom 12% of each page image. For those projects, manual reorder is the right tool.

The mobile app force-closes during scanning

Two flavors:

• While inside the native scanner UI (before tapping Save) — those

captures are held by the OS scanner Activity and unfortunately can't be recovered. Tap Save more frequently to checkpoint work.

• After Save, during "Saving page N of M…" — pages 1..N are

already on disk. Reopen the app, tap the Resume scan batch banner on the Dashboard, and pick up where you left off.

I want to share the app account with a colleague

Not supported per Terms; each user needs their own account. If you want to share output (e.g. hand a finished book to a coworker), use a Share as link export — no account needed to open it.