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Inélsòre
Inspiring
May 19, 2025
Question

Damaged PDF (error 14)

  • May 19, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 1384 views

Dear all,

I have spent the last two hours creating an interactive PDF for my music theory students.

I wrote all questions in Apple Pages (macOS 15.4.1), then exported the PDF and opened it in Acrobat.

Using the Form tool, I added several dropdown menus and carefully crafted them to cover all the questions they will face in the examination. Out of the form tool, I checked for each one of them to work, then saved the document and also opened it in Preview, where I also checked for it to be working. 

Suddenly, the file got damaged and I cannot open it anymore. 

The error, in Italian, is 

Errore durante l'apertura del documento. Si è verificato un problema durante la lettura di questo documento (14).

I absolutely have no time to remake this from scratch, especially if it will result in it becoming corrupted again. The file is attached below and I would appreciate if someone could help me diagnose what happened to it and possibly fix it in a way that I can use it again. 

Thank you very much!

1 reply

try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
May 19, 2025

Preview is a terrible application when it comes to PDF files. It corrupts them just by opening them, although usually not to this extent. You should avoid using it, if at all possible.

I will see what I can do to recover your file, but I can't make any promises.

    try67
    Community Expert
    try67Community Expert
    Community Expert
    May 19, 2025

    This is the best I could do... It doesn't seem it would have had that many fields, though. Maybe 25 tops? Shouldn't take too long to re-create them.

    try67
    Community Expert
    try67Community Expert
    Community Expert
    May 19, 2025

    Forgive my ignorance but, what exactly is the "page dictionary"? 

    If I recall correctly from my little training in basics of programming, a dictionary is a kind of data, such as "key:data", right? If this PDF's dictionary was corrupted, would it be possible to access the code which makes up the PDF and correct it? This is possible with SVG files or EPUB files, for example. Of course, it requires knowledge of what to do once that becomes available. 

    Thank you also for the tool. 

    I will use the two pages and rebuild the first one. Better than nothing I guess! 


    It's an element in the PDF file's structure that contains an array of references to PDPage objects. That array got corrupt so the applications could not find where to begin, hence the first page being "lost". The PDF format is WAY more complicated that EPUB or SVG, so fixing it manually is really not possible. You need to use a low-level library that can read, parse and write these streams to be able to identify and fix such issues.

    The technical document that describes how to do this is more than a thousand pages long... It's a small miracle I Love PDF was able to do it at all. It's probably a common enough issue that they wrote a workaround for it.

    I'd say take what you can get and make sure to always have a backup copy of your files, especially if you spend a lot of time on them.

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