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Preventing EDIS PDFs from Corruption by Adobe Setting

EDIS PDFs Corrupted by Adobe Setting

The USITC has been made aware that enabling the “Save As optimizes for Fast Web Viewing” setting in Adobe Acrobat Standard or Pro may cause PDF documents downloaded from Electronic Document Information System (EDIS) to become corrupted when using the “Save As…” function to save the file under a new name or to a different location.

Document corruption can lead to significant display errors, including the loss of structural symbols. If brackets ($[ ]$) are dropped, users may lose the ability to distinguish CBI/BPI from public text, leading to potential data mishandling.

To reduce the risk of document corruption, two actions are recommended:

  1. Disable the “Save As optimizes for Fast Web View” setting in Adobe Acrobat as follows:
    1. Open any PDF to display it in Adobe Acrobat Standard or Pro.
    2. Select the Menu icon in the upper left corner.
    3. Select “Preferences” from the list (near the bottom).
    4. In the pop-up, select “Documents” in the Categories list.
    5. In the Save Settings section, deselect the option “Save As optimizes for Fast Web View” setting.
    6. Select OK at the bottom. Once disabled, the optimization will not be applied to any PDFs saved in the future unless the setting is re-enabled.

      Note: These instructions are for using Adobe Acrobat in “New Acrobat” viewing mode. The instructions for disabling this setting in “Old (Classic) Acrobat” mode may be different.

  2. After a document has been downloaded from EDIS, use the “Print to PDF” function instead of the “Save As … ” function. This action will save the document without applying the optimization function. Note that if you use the “Save As … ” function later without the optimization setting disabled, it may still corrupt the document.

Once a PDF document has been optimized for “Fast Web Viewing,” the process cannot be reversed, and any resulting corruption cannot be undone. To obtain a clean, unoptimized version, a new copy of the document must be downloaded from EDIS.

To check if this optimization has been applied to a PDF, follow these steps:

  1. Select the Menu icon in the upper left corner.
  2. Select “Document properties…” (A pop-up window will appear).
  3. Check the setting for “Fast Web View:” in the lower right corner.
    1. Yes – indicates optimization has been applied
    2. No – indicates optimization has not been applied

Adobe support has been notified of this issue, and we are hopeful that a resolution will be provided in a future update.

The free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader does not apply the optimization for Fast Web Viewing.