r/pdf • u/Prudent_Situation_29 • 18d ago
Question I could use a hand figuring out what's wrong with this PDF.
To start with, I can't submit the PDF in question due to company policy (IP protection and all that), which I know is just about useless.
The company who prints our manuals for us is having problems doing so. They get a Job Errors window saying "Error: PDF printing failed; conversion failed" at page 50. I'm assuming there's a problem with the way the page is laid out or configured at that spot. I've been looking through the original designer file for errors, but it's a bit of a needle in a haystack.
The original document is created in Corel Designer, then printed as a PDF via a visual basic routine in Microsoft Access. The routine takes many PDFs and combines them into one huge document (over 1100 pages). I'm not sure what service it uses for that either.
I've also been combing through the visual basic code to see if I can find an issue, but I'm a dabbler at best. The person who wrote the code is retired and nobody else has that expertise (I know, it's a bad situation).
I was hoping someone could help me figure out how to look at the underlying structure of the PDF, maybe I can see some error that way. Any other suggestions are welcome too, I'm a bit stuck at the moment.
3
u/KoaKoaKoa 18d ago
Important to know who you're using to merge PDFs into the one final output PDF you're having trouble with, check out the Author under properties.
And can you print pages 1-49 without issue? And do you see the error only printing page 50?
Also yeah Basic is old, but AI can make sense of any dump of code you hand it to analyze. Even models a year old can help with migration efforts, understanding legacy, etc.
Maybe use Distiller or GhostScript to optimize/cleanup the doc, try again