Error When Adding Header/Footer

[eliza72708357]

I have a document that is over 1200pgs, and is made up of several other combined PDFs. When I try to add a header or footer for the purpose of doing page numbers, I get the message: An error was encountered while retrieving page content. How do I get around this error message to be able to add page numbers to my document?

[Karl Heinz Kremer · Accepted solution]

Something in your PDF file is corrupt, and unfortunately, unless you remove the page that causes this problem (if you can actually remove it), you will not be able to add headers or footers.

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can try to run the preflight profile "Report PDF syntax issues". This might point you to the correct page. If that's not a possibility, you can try to cut your document in half by exporting pages 1-600 into one file and pages 601 to the end of the document into a second file. Now try to add headers/footers to each one of these. If you are lucky, one of them will succeed, the other one will fail with the same error. Now take the one that failed and cut it in half again and run the test again on both halfs (which are now a quarter each of your original page count). Keep on going until you identify the offending page. Now you can try to remove that page from your original (all the documents you've created along the way are only necessary to identify the offending page) PDF file and replace it with a non-corrupt version. Now you should be able to add headers and footers to your complete document.

[wdbphoto11]

This is not the sulution for me. In my Acrobat it does not matter which PDF I use, the only font available is symbol. Only restarting and clearing the cache solves the problem.

Adobe, get your act together or the industry will stop using your products. 

[davidl94360079]

Yes, something in the pdf file is corrupt. I have had this problem too. In Acrobat Pro, use Preflight, and select make Compatible with Acrobat 4, then hit Analyze & Fix. This worked for me, fixed the problem without me having to find the exact page(s) it occurred on, and allowed me to add Headers/Footers

[Max154A]

There's a work around that I just discovered and used after putting togther a document that I needed to Bates number.

1. I saved the document as a word file.

2. I then output it as new .PDF file.

3. I added the Bates numbers and it worked without any further issues.

Hope this helps anyone that gets that error message.

Max Myers.

[Victor-Martinez]

You can also convert to JPG and then saved as PDF.

[Gan Partnership]

Mine also not works where some of the pages are the scan copies of cheques and A5 size. But it works on the free version. I use I love pdf to paginate my document. 

[johnm80166113]

I'm using AcrobatPro DC on a Mac and I finally figured out what was corrupting the file. This is new as it has never happened to me before and I've converted my PPT slides to PDF 100 times. When I print my Powerpoint slide note pages to PDF, I was getting this same error. I finally figured out the culprit was dotted lines on my PPT slides. In other words, you draw a line on a slide then make it a dashed or dotted line. When I finally removed all the dotted lines from my slides, then converted to PDF, it allowed me to add the header/footer. Nightmare!

[Jennifer24992735gi32]

I took an 845 pg document and converted it as save as other, selected image and then tiff.  It gave me an error that Acrobat could not save a page in this document due to error "Expected a number object (Page 1)".  I selected ignore and then it created 843 tiff files.  Normally when I cannot OCR a document due to renderable text, I would take each tiff file and indivually converted them to pdf and then combine them back as one pdf.  However when I did this step it only creating 843 tiff files, I found the exact page numbers that were creating the issue and corrupting my document.  I printed those pages, scanned and then inserted them back to the pdf.  Document is fixed!  Lots of steps but I didnt lose my document.