Pdf error when extracting pages

When I am doing research, I often extract the useful chapter that I am citing, and make a copy in my research folder. Although that means I am duplicating files, it also means that everything to do with each project remains together. This in turn means that I don't have to hunt for the related materials (and if only I were always working on the same PC with the same file structure AND with good internet, it would mean I could use shortcuts, but life is not quite that uncomplicated!). 

Sometimes the chapter I want to extract from a pdf file using Adobe Acrobat comes up with an error, though: "Wrong type parameter supplied to a PDS procedure". No matter what I do, the chapter will not 'extract'. It appears that the underlying document might not 'know' what the page numbers actually are, so giving it a range of pages to extract means nothing to the software. The message looks like this:

However, there are some fixes to try:

• Try a different page range in case there is an error in part of the chapter only
• Extract the pages one by one and recompile them in Acrobat
• Make a copy of the file, then delete all the pages before the chapter we want (Ctrl & Shift, Delete). Then delete all the pages after the chapter we want. Save with the new file name
• Print the chapter to pdf. This will probably take a lot longer than we would normally expect. Also, sometimes this can take a bit of experimentation to get the right page range to actually print... as the pages shown may not be the tagged page number; which is what might be causing the print problems in the first place
• Export the chapter to Acrobat Distiller ( File | Export To | PostScript) then click on the resulting emf files to reopen them in Adobe Acrobat. Save as a pdf file once more
• Or exporting the entire file to postscript (.ps) file, then reopening the file in Acrobat and resaving. Unfortunately the bookmarks also disappear, but if we can get our chapter out, we can recreate those in the one chapter easily enough. 

I hope that helps!

Sam

References:

Adobe Help. (16 May 2021). Error: Bad Parameter while deleting pages in Acrobat. https://helpx.adobe.com/in/acrobat/kb/bad-parameter-while-deleting-pages-in-acrobat.html