AsciiDoc preview shows JCEF fallback message instead of rendered content

Observed vs. expected behavior

Expected result (correct result): The preview pane renders the AsciiDoc document as formatted HTML (headings, text, images, etc.).

Actual result (faulty result): The preview pane displays the plugin's fallback text instead of the rendered document. This happens sometimes and at random:

If you can read this and not the content of your document, your preview does not show. One possible reason is that you are using a remote desktop and GPU rendered content is not shown.

To fix this, update the IDE's registry and set the key ide.browser.jcef.gpu.disable to the value true.

To access the registry, open the menu Help | Find Action… and then choose the action Registry…. Once the registry opens, type the key to find the entry, and enable the checkbox to set the value to true. Once you changed the value, restart the IDE for the setting to become effective.

Steps to reproduce

• Open a project containing .adoc files.
• Open any .adoc file in the editor.
• Open the AsciiDoc Preview pane (preview-only view).

One of the ways you can reproduce this is by cloning this repository and clicking through these slides using links in the bottom of each slide (using "Show Preview Only" mode): https://github.com/mehmandarov/llm-security-and-predictability/blob/main/presentation/00_title.adoc. At some point it will start to show the error message mentioned before, but this will happen at random - sometimes after one click and sometimes after many more.

Additional information

• The fallback message appears to originate from the AsciiDoc plugin's HTML, but the underlying cause is JCEF (IntelliJ's embedded Chromium) failing to render GPU-accelerated content.
• Applying the suggested workaround (Registry key ide.browser.jcef.gpu.disable = true, then restart) does not resolve the issue. In addition the preview gets a tendency to blink on rendering asciidoc.
• Switching the AsciiDoc preview browser in Settings → Languages & Frameworks → AsciiDoc → Preview Browser to a non-JCEF option results in non functioning preview (links can not be clicked, for instance and less modern rendering of asciidoc files)
• Other JCEF-based previews (Markdown preview, Quick Documentation) are not affected, it seems.

Environment

OS version: macOS 26.4.1 Tahoe. Display setup: local Retina display

Plugin Version: 0.45.4

IntelliJ Details:

• IDE version: IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Build #IU-261.23567.138, built on April 23, 2026
• JBR / Runtime: Runtime version: 25.0.2+10-b329.117 aarch64 (JCEF 137.0.17-261-b81)

More info: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-245082