Word 2013 PDF - The export failed due to an unexpected error

Question

Like this post for Word 2007, we can't save our Word 2013 document to PDF and simply receive a generic error:

Is there any way to troubleshoot this error? Playing around with the conversion options hasn't helped, although I was able to narrow-down the issue by printing a range of pages and finding "suspicious" content: in this case, it seems to be a complicated diagram built using Word Drawing Art [or whatever it's called?] which the PDF parser mustn't be able handle.

We're also going to look at Office 2013 SP1, but I'm not sure it'll help.

Answer 1

I can't answer for anyone else, but I know Google users arrive here frequently, and I'm going to explain to them how I fixed this for my 600-page document filled with custom formatting, custom fonts and headers. I wasn't about to copy the contents into a second document and risk losing anything; the proofreading would take more time than I had going spare. Printing to PDF would have lost the hyperlinks scattered throughout the document. Images and constructions were integral to understanding what was being written about. In essence, "just do this" answers were not an option.

I set the permissions for t2embed.dll as others here note, but I can't say how much good it did. Word 2016 was alternating between giving me an error ("The export failed due to an unexpected error") and turning white and crashing. It crashed every time I tried to export, it was just a question of when. The program was producing a .TMP file in the directory I was exporting to, but after a few seconds it would vanish and progress would halt.

Eventually I decided to stick a camera up to my screen and film the output in the bottom-right. First it would enumerate the pages, then parse the links, and then slowly increment a counter for which page was being exported. This is assuming the program's interface hadn't crashed, so it took a few attempts. Eventually I found that the last number it was displaying before crashing was page 335. There was nothing strange about page 335, but replacing its contents with "removed to fix PDF export" caused the export to work fine.

Eventually, I copied the contents of page 335 to Notepad++ and changed all the quotation marks and apostrophes (which Word replaces with spicier versions) into normal ones. I copied it back as plain text and removed the hyperlinks. It worked. For some reason, that particular page had become corrupted and wouldn't export. Re-producing it worked.

Answer 2

I had this issue when trying to export a manuscript with custom page size, tables, images, and custom fonts. I successfully saved several version as PDFs in the process of creating the file and making edits. For some reason, the export process stopped working. After reading this thread, I tried a few things with the settings, and even tried to change out a few of the recent images I had included since the last successful export. It wasn't until I started exporting specific pages at a time that I found the issue.

Page 9 had text, but no images, and had been in the manuscript since its creation. When I was redoing the page, I noticed the font formatting at the end of the previous page had switched to something that started with "UF" and looked like Times New Roman, even though I had never formatted either of those into the document. I got rid of the lines that had the weird font (albeit no text there), inserted a new page with the original text that kept the proper formatting, and I'm back in business now.

Answer 3

It was because you are using custom fonts, try CTRL+A and change all fonts to something like "Arial". If you had header and footer, make sure to change that font as well. Somehow the PDF converter not able to convert if the fonts was not default from Microsoft.

Answer 4

In my case it was due to enabling the "Track Changes" feature.

If you have enabled tracking changes in MS Word, just disable it and try to save as pdf again.

It works :]

(Word 2013)

Answer 5

After reading the posts here, I investigate and found out. My problem (in WORD 2016) was because a text box places on an image.

I erased the text box and it is OK. Now I am able to save as PDF.

Answer 6

Similar to Bummi, I had this issue and it was resolved by a user having a blank table cell by itself to serve as a "Checkbox" option beside YES or NO. I replaced these with a regular symbol instead of a blank table, and the issue was resolved.

(Office 2016, click to run. 16.0.6701.1034 32-bit)

Answer 7

try this ---- find word docx file in windows explorer and right click on file and then click on convert to pdf in drop down window --- I have Word 2013 and this seemed to work a treat.. good luck -- junglemac

Answer 8

I just figured out I was receiving that error because I had upload an image to use for bullet points, I had to change the bullet points back to a classic Word option

Answer 9

I'm not sure why @SathOkh's answer was down-rated since this is usually the case for me. (Sorry, I don't have enough reputation to comment directly on the post)

For me, the combination of answers for @seagull and @SathOkh was sufficient to help pinpoint the problem:

• First I checked that I didn't have any custom fonts
• Then, checked that there weren't any links to external documents (File menu, Edit links to documents, under the list of properties)
• Then tried to export to PDF again and watch the status bar to determine the exact page number that caused the problem.
• On that page, I found an image that had been pasted using the Paste Special/Picture (Enhanced Metafile) option. I deleted the picture and pasted it again using Past Special/Picture (PNG) and then the PDF conversion succeeded.

PS: I use track changes on word documents all the time, and they still do convert to PDF.

I wish that MS would include more diagnostic information in their error messages though so it could tell you exactly where it failed.

Answer 10

In my case it was due to an image in the document had become corrupt. We don't know how this image became corrupt (it was a large document that had been last edited a few years back), but any attempts to "save as PDF" gave the error.

Removing the corrupt image allowed the file to be saved in PDF form successfully.

Answer 11

Filming the export process in the right corner is a helpful idea because you can see on which page it goes wrong. For me it was an imported EMF file that made the export failing.

Answer 12

In my case it was due to images and pictures.

I had to remove and import (paste) again some images in the text. I was able to find the images causing the problem by printing only some pages and checking which images caused issues.

Changing fonts, as well as setting permissions for windows\system32\t2embed.dll (another sugessted fix from internet), did not help.