Adobe drawing error

I work with Adobe Acrobat files all the time. I regularly scan screeds of analogue material, then OCR it so it becomes searchable - and so I can get rid of the hardcopy files without getting rid of the information contained within them. When I want to reuse portions of text, I may save the files as a Word document... the text will wrap once more, and it is a bit easier to pull out images and so on.

However, every now and again I get an Adobe error; either when I try to either run text recognition; or when saving the file as a Word document.  The error simply states: "A drawing error occurred". Not only is the error message not very informative, it doesn't really help us to track down and rectify the problem!

In searching online, I was unable to find anything helpful, until I stumbled over an old post in the Acrobat Library site from a user who was having difficulty when trying to amend large files, and getting the "A drawing error occurred" message (Eldridge, 2013). A kindly user suggested that they go to "File, Save As and choose either OPTIMIZED PDF or REDUCED SIZE PDF" (Eldridge, 2013). 

And that was when the lightbulb went off for me... just how large WERE the files I was working with?

Oh, yeah: 200,000Mb. That might be why there was a problem. By simply saving first as a Reduced Size PDF, all the 'drawing error' messages went away. I was able to OCR and save as Word like billy-oh.

Doh!

Sam

References:

Eldridge, V. (2013, August 12). Acrobat Pro XI 'a drawing error occured'; error processing page. An internal error'!. Acrobat Library. https://answers.acrobatusers.com/Acrobat-Pro-XI-drawing-error-occured-error-processing-page-An-internal-error-q118224.aspx