I've had a problem with Acrobat 7.0 on my Mac lately, and if it is persistent then it's a real problem for lawyers who rely on PDF files as their primary document management system. Perhaps it's only a problem with 7.0 on the Mac, in which case it isn't likely to affect most users.
Here's the problem: I scanned all the documents that my opponent sent me in a case. Opponent had bates-stamped the documents and, since the bates numbers correspond to the page numbers, it is easy to navigate to find documents (or particular pages within documents) simply by entering the bates number. But, as I was preparing to file an opposition brief that needed exhibit attachments, I found that when I printed out pages from the opponent's documents the resulting print job looked like a black and white smear painting that was done by a two year old child. Not good.
I could see the pages on my computer just fine. I just couldn't print them. Obviously, I couldn't attach my computer file as part of the court record, so I was in a bit of a fix. However, I didn't panic. I thought about my options. I had no backup copy of the PDF file that was uncorrupted (note to self: keep backup copies of each production) that I could use. But I did have a paper file copy that I could scan (note to self: congratulations on using paper as backup). So I scanned the paper copy and then all was well.
How did this weird 'printing problem' happen? Obviously the file got corrupted somehow. And, since it has happened before I'm zeroing in on the problem. I'm pretty sure that it is happening when I append pages to the existing file. This is what I've done when my opponent produces more documents. I just "insert" them to the existing file at the end, and that keeps all the bates-numbering intact. If the case had thousands of pages of documents I'd probably break the files up into groups of 1,000 pages each. It seems like I can print fine until I insert additional pages and that has the effect of making some of the pages print illegibly (it's not clear why only some get corrupted, and it's not only the new or old pages).
So this "insert pages" feature may be weird problem for me. In the future I'm going to keep PDF copies of each separate production. I can renumber the pages to correspond to the bates-numbering so my 'quick search' trick will still work. Bottom line: always keep lots of backups. It's easy to do in the digital world, so why not?
This is most likely happening because your fonts are not embedded.
Posted by: Kris | April 11, 2007 at 10:16 AM