I tend to do presentations using LaTeX and Beamer, while working on Linux and using TeXLive as LaTeX distribution – which all work fine. But sometimes I need to share these PDFLaTeX compiled presentations with people using Windows and Adobe Acrobat Reader as their pdf viewer. The feedback I usually get back: your pdf is broken, error 131. And frankly, that seems to be true.
Opening PDFLaTeX generated pdf files with Windows Adobe Acrobat Reader results in error 131 – more precisely in the displayed error message “There was a problem reading this document (131)”. Other pdf viewers don’t complain about the pdf, just Adobe Acrobat Reader. A quick solution to repair the pdf file is by using GhostScript:
gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf</code></pre>
Voilà, the pdf file can be opened using Adobe Acrobat Reader – although, the source of the problem still exists of course (generating a pdf file not adhering the standard in the first place).
