Rescuing a possibly corrupt PDF in Acrobat

Question

I have a large Acrobat file (currently 92 pages, 25MB) which is constructed from lots of different sources (1 InDesign and 80 Illustrator files). Since I first brought these sources together, each page of it has been replaced a good dozen times, and the file is starting to creak under the weight. Acroat is giving me warnings about possible corruption, and crashes occasionally when saving.

No data has been lost yet, but it's enough to give me pause. I could reconstruct the file from sources if I had to, but it would take forever to get all the bookmarks and links set up just the way they used to be.

Is there any way of getting Acrobat to rebuild the file from the ingredients and make it easier to work with?

Answer 1

Did you ever use "Save as..." and choose a different filename after your page replacing operations?

With "Save as..." you'll notice that Acrobat indicates various steps of "consolidations" and "optimizations" while it saves the file.

Simple "Save" will not do that. For example, if you "Delete" a page, a "Save" will mark the page + its content just as "hidden", while all the 'deleted' page's bits+bytes are still part of the file. The "Save as..." would remove these bits+bytes.

If you did in fact always use "Save as...", you should try and re-distill the PDF:

If you have a full version of Acrobat (not just AcroReader), print the file to the printer called "Acrobat PDF" and choose a different filename.

If you only have Acrobat Reader, you could use Ghostscript with a commandline similar to:

 gswin32c.exe ^
    -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
    -dBATCH ^
    -dNOPAUSE ^
    -sOutputFile=my-redistilled-original.pdf ^
     c:/path/to/original.pdf`

Answer 2

I have resolved a similar problem in the past just by re-printing the the whole document as a PDF. Worked like a charm in that case.