Editing PDF -> Adobe Acrobat DC has encountered an unknown error

Report · May 23, 2016

It seems to be a common problem, judging by the forum, but there seems not to be a general fix. When I try to edit some pdf-documents I get the not so informative error message "Adobe Acrobat DC has encountered an unknown error". I get the error message when I hit the "Edit PDF"- button and every time I hit the tool buttons "Edit", "Add text" or "Add image". The other tool buttons does not seem to do anything at all.

There is no problem viewing the documents, everything looks all right. If I print one of them with Adobe PDF-printer, the resulting document can be edited without any error messages. That makes me suspect that there is something wrong with these documents. How can I find out what the problem is?

System info:

OS: Windows 8.1 Enterprise

Acrobat version: Adobe Acrobat Pro DC v. 2015-016-20039

There are no document restrictions and no security method is set in the documents I have problems with.
If I run Preflight Analysis, I get "Compatible with Acrobat 5" and "No problems found"
I have tried re-installing Acrobat, and rebooting the computer, but the problems still persists.

How do I get to the bottom with this?

Report · May 23, 2016

The problem with this problem is that it's an "unknown error", so we don't know why exactly the application runs into it.

The first thing I would try is to repair the Acrobat installation: You will find the "Repair" function in Acrobat's Help menu. If that does not fix the problem, you can try to contact Adobe's support (http://helpx.adobe.com/contact.html (don't use any of the "Forum" options, otherwise you will end up here again) ), or, you can try to wipe any trace of Acrobat from your system and re-install the application. When you just uninstall an application, there is still some "crud" that is left on the system. I would recommend that you run Adobe's "Cleaner" tool after the uninstall: Download Adobe Reader and Acrobat Cleaner Tool - Adobe Labs - That should remove any trace of Acrobat. After you install again, test this scenario again and see if the error still pops up.

Report · May 25, 2016

Unfortunately, the cleaner tool did no difference. I'll try to contact Adobe's support. Thank you anyway!

Report · Aug 02, 2016

Here is your fix:

Unable to edit PDF files in Acrobat XI or DC

Here is your work-around:

Unknown error when using Content Editing in Acrobat Std XI