There was an error opening this document. The file is damaged and could not be repaired.

Question

Hi,We are experiencing an issue here, and are desperate for some technical advise. Unfortunately telephone support isn't available. We have stored our .pdf's in a Server 2008R2 environment / web server host. We have however opened the documents failing to open with the error listed, in notepad.The finding is that the version detailed in the header (first line) %1.5* is correct and the document looks to be in tact. The strange thing is through diagnosing this issue we have found the documents to be able to open within Adobe 8.3.0 or previous. Further more proving the document not to be corrupted.Could someone please advise?Acrobat Version is 11.0*Kind Regards,

Karl Heinz Kremer · Answer

The error message is usually correct, but it's not impossible that you are running into a problem with a newer version of Acrobat. Try the following: Open one of these documents in Acrobat 8, and without doing anything else, close the document again. Does Acrobat prompt you to save the file? It should only if the document was modified. Sometimes Acrobat is able to repair such a corrupt document without any user interaction besides a popup that is displayed for just a spit second that says something like "Repairing PDF document". The only evidence you have of that is that you need to save the file. If that's the case, can you then open the newly saved file in Acrobat XI?

If that's not the case, it's still not clear if the file is corrupt or not. Only an analysis of the file would give you that information. Have you tried to open the file in Acrobat or Reader DC? If that works as well, then I would say that there is something wrong with Acrobat XI.

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