Mad at Adobe Acrobat compress file feature. WARNING ‼️

Report · Oct 25, 2023

I spend days drafting a document for the Appellate Court. It had about 30-40 pdfs that were stacked through the pages tool. I used the compress file feature and was impressed . The size was a lot smaller than I expected. I went back in the document and made some final text edits that were simply words added or changed in text fields. I saved them compressed again WARNING THIS almost cost me a legal filing. As I was electronically filing the documents I decided to do one last proof . The last compression had essentially destroyed the work many words and numbers were jumped the text was jibberish and weird characters and big spacing. Had I filed it I would of embarrassed myself in the US Courts. Warning maybe compression should only be done once. Luckily, I always make multiple backups as my work advances. ADOBE you almost cost me big. This bug must be fixed.
I actually have a document that has done this before filed in courts. Now I know how it happens.

Report · Oct 26, 2023

- You should not do changes directly in the PDF file. Do them in the original file and then create a new PDF.

- Do not make any changes to the file after you optimized it, as that will remove all of the "meta" data that is used for defining fonts, layouts of pages, etc., leaving only the bare minimum behind. When you do that and then edit the file's static contents you risk having all kinds of strange issues.

I do agree Adobe should warn people trying to do that, but mostly people just ignore such warnings anyway.

Report · Oct 26, 2023

Yup, if that's the case Adobe should disable the feature once compressed or warn the user. Problem here is what happens when I find an old case file that has been compressed by me or by another without my knowledge. Then I merge that file with another argument for a case. The user can have damaged references. I seen this issue also when you copy and paste from preview.app to acrobat from a compressed pdf. I put it in a motion to excuse myself from an error I didn't catch, I believe I blamed Apple at the time. Lol. Gotta clear my name! If a user highlights (selects) something, then paste it, they expect to see the same verbatim they copied. When it's a big piece of data or in a hurry they might miss the loss.

Also after making changes what I was seeing in Acrobat did not reflect these random characters and scrambled words.
Thanks for the feedback, stay in the loop.

'I do agree Adobe should warn people trying to do that, but mostly people just ignore such warnings anyway.'
are you saying since "some" ignore such warnings Adobe shouldn't warn? Lol pick a side ! All fun ....