Acrobat Reader says PDFs cannot be opened as they are damaged or not decoded properly from email.

Question

This issue started happening over the weekend but most of my PDF files are not from email but downloaded via the browser and were accessible in the past.  Something has changed so perhaps someone can say what the fix is for this issue.  Did a reinstall but still got the same result.

Karl Heinz Kremer · Answer

Is it possible that you are having a problem with your hard disk? When you get this error message from Acrobat (or the free Reader), there usually is something wrong with the PDF file. It's just a matter of figuring out what it is. I've run into one other problem that showed the same symptom that were not caused by a corrupt hard disk: This was with files that were stored in Dropbox, and mirrored on the local hard disk. When the Dropbox application exited in the background, all of a sudden the PDF files were no longer accessible, but still showed up in the directory listing. Afer restarting the Dropbox application, things were working again.

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