I think my PDF has corruption. Now what?

PDF corruption happens very, very rarely, but is a potential risk when working with PDFs.

The following are the most common signs that your PDF has some corruption.

Pages which previously had content (original text and annotations) are now blank.
Annotations which had previously saved have disappeared throughout the document.
In the Page Maker, some pages are displayed with the Ø symbol.
When opening the file, an Unable to Display Document message appears.
When trying to Share your file, the displayed filesize is 0kb.

NOTE: Was your PDF distributed with a time limit? Protected scripts often encounter issues after their time limit expires.

Here's what you need to do:

Close all tabs in Scriptation, and update in the App Store.

Close the file, then wait a few seconds, and re-open the file again.

Make a local copy of your file, and rename it without spaces or special characters.

Import a clean PDF of the file that is displaying the error message, and transfer your notes from the "corrupt" file into the new file.

If your file is saved locally (On my iPad / iPhone), and you have performed all of the above steps, the last potential solution to recover your file is by restoring your entire device from iCloud Back-up. To learn more, click here.

Best Practices for the Future

Use Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive cloud storage: These cloud providers allow for version controlled saving, and create a new restorable version after each save instance. Should your PDF file become corrupt, it's easy to restore to an earlier version from within each providers' web portal.

What's Next

How to sync files across devices with Cloud Storage
Are my files saved automatically?
How often do files upload / sync to cloud?

Updated on: 03/10/2024