Acrobat and Word refuse to export .docx to bigger than 20MB

[head4heights]

First things first.

Mac Pro (late 2013) with El Capitan 10.11.6, Word 15.24 and Acrobat Pro 2015.017.20053

I knocked together a Word document which happens to have a lot of images. It needs to go to some legal people (et al) so I wanted it in PDF.

Within Word it fails with a message:

"This version of Word can't export to this type of file because the file is too large. Generally a file that is larger than 20MB is too big to export"

Unimpressed with this arbitrary cap on file sizes and also the hint that there might be an unspecified version of Word that does work, I tried Acrobat.

But Acrobat uses Word to do the export. It fails with the same message. What is the point of that?

How, good people, short of wasting hours of my short life resizing and replacing masses of images can this absurd restriction be overcome?

Many thanks,

[Dov Isaacs]

Perhaps you can post a sample Word file that exhibits this issue such that we can examine it here at Adobe and see what is really going on and try to find a resolution to the issue.

          - Dov

[head4heights]

Very happy to Dov, can you give me an email address I can use to send it to you please, I don't think the rest of the community are interested in it.

Many thanks.

[Dov Isaacs]

I'll contact you off-list by e-mail.

          - Dov

[Dov Isaacs]

I received a copy of the Microsoft Word document in question and tried this on my MacOS system (same version) with the same versions of Word and Acrobat.

I opened the Word document in Word, went to File=>Print and at the bottom left of the dialog box, chose Save as Adobe PDF. In the ensuing dialog, I selected High Quality Print as the Adobe PDF Settings and Adobe Acrobat for After PDF Creation and then pressed Continue. In the final dialog, I specified the location for the PDF file to be sent to.

What followed after a few seconds was that Acrobat opened displaying the full 36 page PDF file. There were no errors.

I sent a copy of the resultant PDF file to the original poster.

I was guessing that perhaps the problem might have been that the original poster used File=>Save As and then specified PDF as the file type or went to File=>Print and specified ​Save as PDF instead of Save as Adobe PDF, neither of which use any Adobe technology. But trying those, while they didn't use any Adobe technology, didn't error out as described.

For the record, no Adobe component provide an error message This version of Word can't export to this type of file because the file is too large. Generally a file that is larger than 20MB is too big to export.

Thus, as this point, without some further information, we are somewhat stuck because using identical software configurations, we cannot duplicate the problem either with Acrobat's PDF creation plug-in or not. 

          - Dov

[head4heights]

Thank you all who have assisted me here.

In typically annoying IT fashion the problem has resolved itself (grrrrr) and I am now able to produce the PDF from Word using either File> Save As...  or  File> Print... without getting an error.

What has changed since I posted is that this morning I discovered that any and all Word documents opened up as blank pages. Even creating a document from a template behaved the same. I've had issues with Mac Word before with the Normal.dotm becoming unhealthy and so I closed Word, zapped the Normal and restarted Word. Big sigh of relief when my documents reappeared. Maybe this is related?

Many thanks again.

[sarahk49331714]

Printing as PDF doesn't allow the option to optimize for web--I need hyperlinks in this word document to also work in the PDF. Printing renders them useless.