Using Save As corrupts PDFs in Acro 7

[brian_hardy@adobeforums.com]

We’ve been experiencing a recurring problem where supposedly trouble-free documents are becoming corrupted after doing any action that forces a Save situation, such as inserting, replacing or deleting pages in Acrobat 7.08. When the PDF is reopened, there are lots of character dropouts and substitutions. It seems any action that forces Acrobat to do the Save As/Optimization routine is corrupting the PDFs. A simple Save doesn’t seem to cause problems.

We are using Mac OS X 10.4 and the original PDFs are created out of Word 2004 (version 11.2) using the Acrobat 7.0 printer driver and Press Quality settings (although it seems to happen no matter what settings we choose). With those settings, the fonts should be imbedded correctly so I can’t see why this corruption is occurring. The fonts we are using are primarily Type 1 Helvetica and Times, and TrueType Symbol for Mathtype equations.

At first we thought it might have something to do with how Acrobat subsets the fonts but we tried turning off the subset option and this made no difference. The problem doesn’t happen to all of our PDFs but seems to occur primarily in documents that have a lot of Mathtype and Illustrator EPS graphics in them.

What’s frustrating is that the problem may not show up the first 10 times you open the document but will on the 11th. Or it may show up on one computer but not another, even though they have the same font sets.

This issue also happens to multiple computers so I know that it’s not simply corrupt settings or preferences in one copy of Acrobat that is causing it. Mostly, it makes me long for the days of Acrobat 5 when PDFs just simply worked.

[de_Siem@adobeforums.com]

Acrobat 5 had similar issues as well.
When you're assmebling a pdf (inserting deleting and moving pages around) you're changing the internal structure of the pdf as well.
When finishing off the assembly by a save as, the pdf gets optimized which also changes the structure. Normally it shouldn't damage the pdf in the way you are seeing but if it does it will be dependent on what's in the document. (font and structure wise)

The first thing to try is to turn off 'optimize for fast webview' when doing a save as. You find this in the general preferences.
Also try and hold off doing a save as until the document is completed. Use normal save in the meantime.

[Leonard_Rosenthol@adobeforums.com]

This problem has NOTHING to do with the document becoming corrupt OR the problems experienced with Acrobat 5 - that's all a red herring.

The situation is that you are merging documents together that are using the same name for two different fonts - thus causing Acrobat to "get confused" when it attempts to render the text. This is because there was a problem/error in the creation of the PDFs, since properly created font data shouldn't cause this to happen.

Leonard

[brian_hardy@adobeforums.com]

Hi de Siem and Leonard. Thanks for the replies. They have been most helpful.

I don't think merging of font data is causing the problem since I can replicate the problem merely by deleting pages from a problem file and the next time I open it, there will be missing or substituted characters.

However, I tried de Siem suggestion of turning off "optimize for fast webview" and so far it is doing the trick. I've tried adding, deleting and replacing pages and (so far) everything seems to be okay.

[Seth_McGraw@adobeforums.com]

Once a file has been corrupted in this way, is there a way to reverse the effects. I have a 47 page interactive file that has been edited many times over the recent years and now (on any platform) refuses to embed 1 font. The font is licensed and has not been a problem in the past. It replaces all characters with a bullet that use this font. I would like to globally substitute the font, but it seems that this is impossible. It only effects the edits made this year. Other instances from previous edits are unaffected even though it uses the same font.