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Adorable_day7487
Participant
October 20, 2026
Question

I am receiving a message that a pdf document cannot be opened becasue it is either not a supported file type or because the file has been damaged. These are documents that have previously opened successfully and are not emailed documents.

All of a sudden, pdf documents that have existed for various periods of time have a little brown box superimposed over the Adobe icon and I receive a message that the document cannot be opened because it is either not a supported file type or has been damaged. The message also states that to create an Adobe PDF document, I should go to the source application and print the document to Adobe PDF. No clue what this means. There seems to be no obvious pattern in that some of these documents were converted to pdfs (by me) from Word documents, some were pdfs downloaded from different sources. The only thing that has changed was a power outage last week, but everything else appears to be unchanged. Some of these are critical documents that really need to be accessed.

    2 replies

    justlearn
    Community Expert
    justlearnCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    October 25, 2026

    ​@Adorable_day7487 The brown overlay icon may provide an important clue. The little brown box overlay on the PDF icon makes me wonder if Windows is no longer associating those files with Acrobat correctly, or if a sync/backup program is marking them as unavailable? The clue is the error about "not a supported file type or has been damaged."

    Does the PDF open in a different application? Can you open the same file in a web browser such as Edge or Chrome? Do the affected files still have a .pdf extension when you view them in File Explorer? If you right-click one of the files and choose Open with - Adobe Acrobat, does it open? Are these files stored locally, or in OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or a network drive? Does every PDF fail, or only some of them?

    Since this started after a power outage, I'd also check whether the files were moved to cloud-only status, a drive developed file-system errors, or the PDF association became corrupted. If PDFs won't open in any application, try copying one of the affected files to your Desktop and check its file size. If the size is 0 KB or unusually small, the file may have been damaged. If it opens in a browser but not Acrobat, try repairing or reinstalling Acrobat.

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    PriyankaVishwakarma
    Community Manager
    PriyankaVishwakarmaCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    October 21, 2026

    Hi ​@Adorable_day7487,

     

    Thank you for reaching out. I understand how concerning this can be, especially when PDF files that previously opened without issue are now showing an error and some of them contain important information. 

     

    As a first step, please check for Acrobat updates by going to Help > Check for Updates and Install any available updates. 

     

    To help us investigate further, please share the following details: 

    • Are the affected PDFs stored on your local machine or in a cloud-synced location such as OneDrive, Dropbox, or SharePoint? Does this occur with all PDF files or only certain documents? 

    • If possible, share a short screen recording showing the PDF icon with the brown box overlay and the complete error message when attempting to open the file. 

    • Are you using a Windows or Mac device? Please also share the OS version. 

    • Which version of Acrobat Reader/Acrobat is installed (Menu > Help > About Acrobat) 

     

    This information will help us better understand the issue and identify the most appropriate next steps. We look forward to your update. 

     

    Regards, 

    Priyanka Vishwakarma

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