The file “out.pdf” could not be opened.

[john-catalano]

"It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn’t recognize."

Hi. I'm getting the above error message when I try to open the resulting PDF.

I've installed pdftilecut from homebrew on macOS 11.4. There were no errors during the install.

I have a sample "in.pdf" file on ~/Desktop. It is 1.7MB.
Here is a link to that in.pdf file

From ~/Desktop, I run:
pdftilecut -tile-size A4 -in in.pdf -out out.pdf

This message is produced:
2021/06/06 14:14:58 cannot find MediaBox for page:
/Contents 6 0 R
/Parent 3 0 R
/Resources 8 0 R
/Type /Page

An "out.pdf" file is created that is 660 bytes. When I attempt to open it, I get the titled error.
Here is a link to that out.pdf file

Here is my use case:
I have PDFs that are exported from Safari (both iOS and macOS) that end up being one, long PDF page, rather than split/paginated. Yes, I could simply Print to PDF, but these long PDFs are what results when you choose "Annotate" in Safari on iOS. I find it easier to read/work on PDFs that are in A4 format, but, I digress.

Can you advise on the above?

Thank you,

John

[oxplot]

Your input file in.pdf has errors in it. Running it through ghostscript prints the following error:

$ gs \
  -o repaired.pdf \
  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
  -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress \
   in.pdf
GPL Ghostscript 9.54.0 (2021-03-30)
Copyright (C) 2021 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
This software is supplied under the GNU AGPLv3 and comes with NO WARRANTY:
see the file COPYING for details.
   **** Warning: considering '0000000000 XXXXX n' as a free entry.
   **** Warning: considering '0000000000 XXXXX n' as a free entry.
   **** Warning: considering '0000000000 XXXXX n' as a free entry.
Processing pages 1 through 1.
Page 1

   **** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
   **** The file was produced by: 
   **** >>>> iOS Version 14.6 (Build 18F72) Quartz PDFContext <<<<
   **** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
   **** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF
   **** specification.

Nonetheless, having run it throught ghostscript, you get a file you can successfully tile:

repaired.pdf

[oxplot]

Looks related to #5