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Inélsòre
Inspiring
February 4, 2026
Question

Importing a PDF page into Illustrator corrupts original PDF file

  • February 4, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 33 views

Dear all,

yesterday I launched Illustrator, then pressed Cmd-O, selected a PDF, selected a specific page to Open and everything looked fine. I saved this as an .ai file and worked on it for a while, moving the image to another layer, drawing above it, etc. 

Today, when opening the original PDF in Acrobat, it started to behave strangely (slow, flashing screen, non-responsive) and upon going to the page that was opened in Illustrator the error “Not enough data” appeared and then Acrobat crashed.

Going into macOS Finder and looking the that PDF returned a PDF icon without a preview, clear sign of a damaged document. Neither Preview not Acrobat could open it with all its pages intact. I used Time Machine and restored a previous version but this was quite scary. 

Please know that I didn’t LINK the PDF to Illustrator, rather opened one of its pages and then saved it as an .ai document. 

What did I do wrong? How can my workflow be improved so that this doesn’t happen again? The reason for opening the file in Illustrator is not to edit the PDF but to draw things on it so that they can then be exported as SVGs and opened in other programs.

Thank you very much!

    1 reply

    Randy Hagan
    Community Expert
    Randy HaganCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 5, 2026

    How many pages was the original PDF document? Where was it originally created, and with which program? What version(s) of Acrobat and Illustrator are you using? When you selected a single page, did you use Acrobat to extract it into a new file or did you just pick one page from Illustrator, then open it?

     

    If you opened one page in Illustrator, you may want to open the larger PDF first in Acrobat, then extract the page you want to later open in Illustrator and save it as a single-page file. I suspect that you’ll find it works much better for you.

     

    If it doesn’t work with the extracted page in a separate file from Acrobat, then opening that extracted page in Illustrator, providing us with the answers to the questions above will better help us help you.

     

    Hope this helps,

     

    Randy

     

      I
      InélsòreAuthor
      Inspiring
      February 5, 2026

      Pages: 58

      Created as a scan, the original file says this in Get Info: macOS Version 13.7.1 (Build 22H221) Quartz PDFContext

      Acrobat version: 2025.001.21145

      Illustrator version: 30.2

      No, I used the open feature in Illustrator directly, possibly while the PDF was also open in Acrobat at the same time. I should have perhaps thought about that before. 

      Randy Hagan
      Community Expert
      Randy HaganCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      February 5, 2026

      Sometimes that look “upon further review” is revealing.

       

      It’s not easy, but if you somehow managed to open the same file on multiple applications, that could certainly cause the corruption issues you had. Setting that aside, try using the replacement file to first extract the page you want as a separate, discrete PDF file, then open it in Illustrator and see if that works better. 

       

      I’m hopeful that you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the result.

       

      Randy

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