Diagnostic module

The Diagnostic module examines your PDF and points out what, in this particular file, will keep some tools from working. It changes nothing: it observes, explains, and sends you to the module that unblocks the situation. You reach it from the General category of the Dashboard.

It is the first module to open when an operation "doesn't work" without an error message: more often than not, the cause is in the document rather than in the application.

What it checks

The text layer

A PDF that came out of a scanner holds only page images: no selectable text. Extraction, search and statistics will come back empty, with nothing to explain why.

The diagnostic tells three cases apart:

• No text layer — the document is entirely an image. Character recognition (OCR) is needed;
• Incomplete text layer — only some pages are scanned. Extraction and search will skip them;
• Text layer present — all is well.

The table of contents

With no outline, splitting by bookmarks has nothing to cut and the Table of Contents module opens empty. The diagnostic says so, and reminds you that a structure can be generated automatically.

Protection

An encrypted document behaves differently: some tools refuse to write, and usage restrictions — printing, copying, editing — block the matching modules without always saying so.

The diagnostic names the rights that are refused, which explains in one line why a given button does nothing.

Form fields and annotations

Their presence changes what flattening means: fill the fields before flattening, never after, because the operation freezes them for good. Annotations, for their part, print with the document and disappear when you clean up.

Page sizes

A document whose pages are not all the same size gives uneven results when printing and resizing. It is a common cause of "the preview doesn't match the result".

Reading the results

Each finding carries a marker:

At the top of the list, one sentence sums things up: either "Nothing in this document should get in your way", or the number of points to watch.

When a finding has a fix inside the application, an Open … link takes you straight to the module concerned.

Typical uses

• "Text extraction returns nothing" — the diagnostic will say whether the document is an image, and offer OCR;
• "I can't print" — it will say whether the document forbids printing, and send you to Unprotect;
• "Splitting by bookmarks is greyed out" — it will say the document has no outline;
• "My printout shifts from page to page" — it will say whether the page sizes are mixed.

Note: the diagnostic never modifies the document. You can open it at any time without risk, including on a file you have not saved yet.