Filename Character Length Limit in Acrobat

[Rodrigo22160188mpti]

I regularly run into the following error message in Acrobat when trying to Save to PDF in Word.  To work around the issue, I have to Print the documentment to the Acrobat printer.  It doesn't appear to have this limitation.

This seems like a limitation based on very old versions of Windows and should be gone on Windows 10 and 11 as well as the current versions of Acrobat.

I've left feedback regarding the issue, but that seems to have been pointless.

Any thoughts on how to get this fixed?

[Amal.]

Hi @Rodrigo22160188mpti 

Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out.

Please go through the similar discussion that I have found on Microsoft support page https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/file-name-too-long-for-destination-folder/250a... and see if that helps.

~Amal

[Rodrigo22160188mpti]

This doesn't appear to be the problem as the only application that runs into this limitation is Adobe Acrobat.  I have never received this error in any other application when utilizing long filenames and deep paths.

[Amal.]

Hi there

Please try to copy the file to your desktop an see if that works.

Let us know how it goes.

~Amal

[Rodrigo22160188mpti]

That, of course, works as that path to the file is very short.

Windows itself, has no issue with the long file path to the original location, but Adobe Acrobat does.  This has been an issue for several years now.

[Amal.]

Hi there

Thanks for sharing the detailed information.

It's actually not a filename limit that is imposed by the operating system, but a path limit. Your path (that's all the directories plus your filename) can only be a certain length.

~Amal

[Rodrigo22160188mpti]

I see.  However, even with this limit, other programs, such as Microsoft Word and Excel don't seem to bump up against this restriction.  They simply work as expected and allow for long file paths, so why doesn't the Adobe Acrobat Save to .PDF function do the same?  The rest of the Acrobat application seems to allow for long file paths and the Acrobat Print to .PDF function handles them just fine.

[Amal.]

Hi there

This is the design behavior of the application. You may share your feedback with the engineering team using the link https://acrobat.uservoice.com/

~Amal

[Rodrigo22160188mpti]

For those that are following this topic, here is the link to the bug report if you'd like to vote for it's resolution.

https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/590923-acrobat-for-windows-and-mac/suggestions/47523920-word-sa... 

[Rodrigo22160188mpti · Accepted solution]

I just ran into a similar problem when trying to print to a PDF file.  I have a series of files where the path is too long for the Save as PDF option to work.  If I try to use that function I get the path too long error.  To get around that, I just Print to PDF using the Acrobat PDF Printer.  However, on a couple of the files with the path too long error, when I went to print them using the printer option, it started the printing process but then hung or got stuck with only a bit of the progress bar being completed.  I waited for 3-4 minutes to see if it would complete and then canceled the print job when it didn't.

I suspected that the filename/path was too long, so I printed the files to another directory just off of the root directory and they printed without issue.  So, it would appear that even the Acrobat PDF Printer suffers from this same issue, but doesn't even generate an error, it simply hangs.

Microsoft Office doesn't have any issues with these long paths and filenames, so it still appears to be a problem with Acrobat.  <Sigh>