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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.

    I
    InélsòreAuthor
    Inspiring
    May 19, 2025

    Thank you very much.

    You managed to recover the 2nd and 3rd page but the first page has vanished, perhaps that's the one that caused troubles. 

    The problem was not the amount of fields but that often each field had up to 30 items in the dropdown menu. 

    I have never had this kind of troubles with Preview before, and it has never corrupted files for me before today, especially not on opening. But I will treasure your advice of course.

    Any chance of the first page being recoverable?

    Oh, and by the way, is the method you used to recover this shareable or is it some sort of philosopher's stone formula? 🙂 I would love to learn, nothing more. 

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