PDF document is damaged and cannot be repaired (Acrobat Pro/Reader, MacOS)

Question

I have been getting this error message on a number of PDFs. The first one this happened with will open OK in Acrobat Reader but not in Acrobat Pro; more recent ones won't open with either, but will open OK in Apple Preview or PDF Expert. I am running MacOS Ventura 13.2 and the latest versions of Acrobat Pro and Reader. I have found this explanation in Adobe Support: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/pdf-error-1015-11001-update.html#, which looks like it would solve my problem if I knew how to implement it. I am reasonably comfortable with Terminal, but I have no idea how to achieve the recommended actions. How do I "use a similar method on Mac OS by modifying the same plist preference" or "create a DWORD"?

Karl Heinz Kremer · Accepted Answer

Right — it took a while for Dropbox to sync. Here's the smallest of the files:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9knxnv0fo1d76b/Estavayer-le-Lac%2C%20Paroisse%20catholique%20Saint-Laurent%2C%20Volume%20III.pdf?dl=0

Can you see where the corruption may lie?

This is a massive file, and unfortunately without spending a huge amount of time, it's impossible to figure out exactly what's wrong. Unfortunately, when you open the file in Preview and export or save it, it still shows the same problem in Acrobat. I found one way to fix the file, but it does require a few steps: The open source Apache PDFBox library comes with a few applications, one of them is a split function. I used that to split the document into one page individual PDF files (it may also work with larger chunks, I have not tried that), and then combined them in Acrobat into a new PDF file. After I saved that file, I was able to open it in Acrobat without the problem. The filesize is similar, that suggests that the content has not changed. You can find PDFBox here:

https://pdfbox.apache.org/

Here is information about how to use the split function: https://pdfbox.apache.org/2.0/commandline.html#pdfsplit

I would get in touch with the people behind the PDF creator that you've used and see if they are aware of problems with large files and recent versions of Adobe Acrobat.

Karl Heinz Kremer · Answer

Here is information about the the same concepts on the Mac: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/AdminGuide_Mac/macintosh_deployment.html?highlight=plist

As the original article says, this will be done in a Plist file (specifically ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro.plist). You need a Plist editor, there is one included in Xcode.

Before we do that however, let's figure out if this really is your problem. Open the PDF file in question in NotePad and look at the first line. Does the file start with %PDF- followed by a version number? If so, this is is not your problem. If it does not start with %PDF, can you find the string "%PDF-" (without the quotes) in your file? If so, how far from the beginning of the file is it?

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