Casedo won't export or print to PDF

PDFs can be deceptive. Many of them are simply text on pages, and some have graphics embedded in them. Others still have transparent layers which may contain a variety of things including text, graphics, signatures and other objects. Some of these interfere with Casedo and make it fail to export the Casefile to pdf, or to print it. Sometimes it can make Casedo itself crash.

Casedo acts very much like an archive repository for external documents, so in that sense it’s beholden to the whims of those documents. So the issue is usually one of the imported documents that is causing the trouble, rather than Casedo itself.

To identify the culprit, you need to drag each of the documents in the Index to the Desk Space and then try to export the remaining to pdf (when you export or print a Casedo file, it ignores the documents in the Desk Space). If Casedo doesn’t work, put that document back into the Index and repeat, until you have success.

TIP If you have used folders to organise your bundle, try dragging them (and their contents) to the Desk Space one by one as above, and then try to export the bundle. This should help narrow down the culprit much more quickly.

Here’s an example workflow that has worked for one of our users:

1. Make sure your Desk Space is empty.
2. Drag the BOTTOM 50% of docs / folders into the Desk Space from the Index.
3. Try to export.
4. If casefile doesn’t export, drag 50% out again, until you have identified the problem…
5. If casefile does export, drag 50% of the Desk Space in again until you have identified the problem.
6. Once you have identified the problem docs drag them into the desk space and make sure the rest exports.
7. OUTSIDE of Casedo open the problem docs in Adobe or similar and print them to PDF.
8. Once you’ve done that, delete all the problem docs in the Casedo desk space and import all the new ones, and see if they now work…

That should identify the problem document. If it does, then, externally to Casedo, take that document and ‘flatten’ it, replacing the culprit with the new document. The Casedo file should now export as expected.

To learn how to flatten a PDF read How to flatten your documents.

Going forward we will include a pdf optimise function within Casedo itself.