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Why am I getting an error message when trying to combine files into one PDF file?

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
July 28, 2017
11 replies
181012 views

When I select multiple PDF files and try to combine them into one document, I get a message that "Adobe Acrobat has encountered and unidentified error" and no file is being created. This problem has only recently started as I have been able to merged documents in the past.

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Correct answer Pablo3307757882fo

ONE QUICK EASY SOLUTION HERE, THANKS ME LATER

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Pablo3307757882foCorrect answer

New Participant

ONE QUICK EASY SOLUTION HERE, THANKS ME LATER

Sekect the following in Options

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Michael259365743vvs

New Participant

When you're in the combine window select the "gear" options and choose the middle file size.

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TKMontana

New Participant

I don't know if this will help but I had 3 pdfs that it wouldn't let me combine. I had get them all in one pdf using "combine" but when I tried to save it I would get error 15, saying it can't read the document. This is on a Mac. The workaround is to one one of the pdf's in "Preview", change "View" to "thumbnail" and drag the other pdf's in. Worked like a charm. Good luck!

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Pauline5E15

New Participant

I am afraid I don't seem to be able to find the answer to this. My charity pays monthly for this subscription precisely so that it can combine complex papers for board meetings into one document. I now find I cannot do that and have tried repairing, re-installing etc. and nothing works. The files it won't combine are pdfs that have been downloaded or received from external sources. I was previously able to combine but can't now. Can Adobe help or refund our subscription please?

try67

Community Expert

What happens when you try to combine the files, exactly?

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mblom_blom

New Participant

We are a print shop looking for Workstation Specifications (CPU, Memory, HDD, etc.) that would allow us to combine over 10,000 seperate PDF files into one. Do you have any guidlines?

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billbo65

New Participant

I have had the same issue. Able to combine MS Excel files and Adobe Acrobat Pro 2017 PDF files, then one day get the above error message. Funny though I used to just save all my Excel files as PDFs and then combine. That has always worked but was very time consuming. Then wanted to save time by combining the straight Excel file with PDF's. That's when the problem began. Initially did a repair in Adobe's program help section and that fixed temporarily but now back to the same problem. Our company IT group is now looking to see what the issue may be. No fix yet though.

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Jay Laud

New Participant

Same issue as everyone else. Just upgraded my OS to Mohave, attempting to make a 10 page PDF of small locally stored .png screenshots which worked perfectly in the older OS, now I consistently get the same error message. No explanation or resolution of this issue. What the heck!

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Robert Coldwell

New Participant

After working with Adobe technical support on this they entered bug ADC-4287003 for this problem. I confirmed it is not the files because it happens at different points in a set of files being combined depending on whether they are TIF, JPG or PNG. It is also not the macOS version since it happened to me on both Mojave and Catalina. The latest Acrobat DC for Windows does not have this problem (and disappointingly completes the combine much faster than the Mac version of Acrobat DC - running on the same Mac hardware in a VirtualBox machine). Adobe did not tell me when to expect this bug to be fixed.

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ivopivo420

New Participant

For those who can't wait for an update: an Adobe customer support rep suggested a workaround that doesn't solve the problem in and of itself and requires an extra step. Basically, you need to create individual PDF files of the images with the "Create PDF" tool in a first step, and then proceed to merge those individual files into a single file in a second step. Like I said, this is not a perfect or permanent solution and is slightly more time consuming, but I'm glad this option is available for the time being. Thought I'd share this with those of you who weren't fully aware of this possibility (as I was). Certainly looking forward to that update though!

itperson000

New Participant

We are having a similar issue. User tries to combine 10 word documents (Office 2016) in Adobe Pro 2017 on a windows 10 PC. The first five documents string together and then stops on document 6 and gives error - no application found to open the document. We resaved the document with a different name, copied the material and saved as new doc with 2 added to the name, converted to pdf - uninstalled Adobe and reinstalled, checked for updates, repaired office. When using the pdf version to combine the file get error encountered when combining the file message. The files are saved on a NAS storage device - the user emailed me the files, I saved them to my desktop and the combined with no issue.

We are also seeing an issue for this user when combining files that all seems to combine fine but then when you open the pdf pages are missing or text from one page is missing and a graph shows up on the other half of the page. These are all combined using documents that were converted to pdf first from powerpoint or excel and look fine - then drop the information when combined. It is impossible to be able to go back through a 300 page document to make sure every page converted properly.

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theophilus

New Participant

For what it's worth, I was having this same mystery problem. I was trying to combine ~250 .jpg files into a PDF. It would get to image 130 or so and then start throwing errors. The workaround I used was to make 3 separate PDF's, max of 100 images each (the number might change, I suspect due to available memory?). I then combined those three PDF's with no issues.

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GALLAMA

New Participant

Thanks for your reply

I too am able to do that but it makes my workflow slow in having to do that.

We dont pay Adobe the big $$$ for our subscriptions to have to do that.

Its like buying a car that only has 3 wheels. impractical! 😞

cheers

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joeli72053031

New Participant

We have an entire team that has the same problem. Windows 10 - fully patched - new Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, trying to combine Word files, local and network, no difference where they are located. Makes no difference the size. We use Office 365 Premium. All machines are managed by upstream corporation with no ability to disable updates.

There are a few sporadic installs on older PCs with Adobe Pro X that are still able to merge the exact same files from their native network location. It's just anyone with newer PCs and Office installations that are unable to do so.

Any word from Adobe?