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Answered

Unable to extract pages in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
November 21, 2018
5 replies
32086 views

Hi I'm unable to extract pages in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.

In the Organize Pages area, I've highlighted the pages needed but when I click Extract I get the dialog box "Please enter a valid page range"

No matter what type of page selection I try - one page, two pages, odd pages - I still get the "Please enter a valid page range" dialog box upon hitting the Extract button.

What's the solution to this? How can I extract pages from a pdf when using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC?

Correct answer maxwithdax

Well I hope I don't find any more of them!!

Have you tried renumbering the pages in Acrobat?

1. In the left navigation pane, click the Page Thumbnails button to open the Page Thumbnails panel.

2. Choose Page Labels from the Options menu.

3. Select the "All" Radio button

4. Select Begin new section

5. Click okay.

6. Save document

7. Now try extracting your pages

Success??

- Dax

pmkm

Participating Frequently

I'm writing this reply 22 July 23, years after this post, and with no technical insights at all ... I'm not a power user or a consultant ... I just have to use the program every day and try not to throw things at the screen. So ... just in case anyone else comes across this problem and looks here for an answer:

Having just sighed for the Nth time about this problem ... and the mega-annoying message "One or more pages is in use and can't be deleted" (when you know you've only just this second reopened the file to see if, once again, you can in fact delete two pages from it ...) ... I once AGAIN quit the program, reopened and ... found I could extract the pages. Sometimes deleting the page thumbnails individually down the left-hand side works better than using the Extract / Delete after Extracting function ... and if you've had 25 goes trying to do it the way you're supposed to be able to do it, there is some satisfaction in seeing them disappear individually. I've found the simple Quit to be the workaround for everything so far, since having to change to Pro DC. I've never reinstalled the program and clever stuff like that ... my realistic user manual says "Sigh, Quit, kick yourself for not having recently saved (if that's the case), make a coffee and wish you could still use Adobe Pro XI (but I can't on the Mac that I now have)". Hope this might help someone!

My similarly high-powered technique of quitting is also the workaround for the fabulous "Dict object expected" (yeah, right ... that's a really helpful piece of user interface when you're trying to draw a line or a box ... or frankly comment in ANY way and that pops up ...!!!) ...

If you're reading this ... I empathise hugely and hope the simple Quit works for you.

V

VirtualSophie

Participant

I had same issue and discovered that the file was not a tru pdf file - insted it was an xfa form, so a work around would be to print to pdf either using adobe print to pdf or microsoft print to pdf which will "flatten" the file and allow you to print only specific pages. Only caviot I could find was that you will lose signature blocks so will have to add them back if there were any.

~not an adobe representative just a user who found a work around

J

Jody5C55

Participant

I just experienced this for the first time. Nothing I did would work...until I clicked Print (printer icon) and then for the Printer chose Adobe PDF. It immediately opened the Save PDF Save As and I was able to save it. I am still curious as to why it began doing this when extracting pages.

C

Criss_Hartzell

Participant

I've had the same problem with certain files. I am unable to extract using Tools>Organize Pages>Extract.

But, I can extract if I open the Page Thumbnails > Dropdown menu > Extract Pages. (This is NOT the same as the thumbnails under the Tools>Organize Pages menu.

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC version 2019.012.20040

steengr

Participating Frequently

None of the above work in a file I have. The issue is probably that it is impossible to save the file. No, there are no protection in that file.

The only workaround I have found so far is to print the file (as pdf of course). This gives me a new - most likely identical file - but with the difference that from this I can extract and so on.

Any idea what goes on in that case?

try67

Community Expert

There's no such thing as a PDF file that can't be saved. If you're viewing it it means it's already saved.

Without seeing the actual file it's very difficult to hazard a guess as to what's going on.

try67

Community Expert

I've seen it happening when the pages had labels and it turned out that Acrobat was looking at the label instead of the physical page number, but that doesn't seem to be the case in your file (from the screenshot, at least), so it's very strange.

Are you able to select pages in the Pages panel, drag and drop them to the Desktop (or any other folder) and create a file like that?

L

LizPopAuthor

Participant

Honestly I think it's a bug in the program. It doesn't happen all the time. Just with certain files. Maybe the source is the issue? Maybe the source file was something other than a .pdf originally (Artios CAD for example). I deal with files converted into pdf's al the time and never had an issue with extracting pages until installing Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. It's kind of a bummer

Yes - dragging the page to the desktop works. Thanks for that solution!

try67

Community Expert

I won't surprise me, to be honest. Acrobat DC seems to be riddled with bugs of various kinds.

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