You added a PDF and the pages are blank, some are missing, or nothing appeared.
What Docuslice does with a PDF
It opens the file, reads every page, and offers each one to you as a separate item to tick. The pages you choose arrive on the canvas as individual media.
It also keeps the original file, so a vector PDF export can embed the real vector page rather than a picture of it.
Two things follow from that, and they answer most reports:
- Every page arrives pre-ticked. The selection step defaults to importing everything, so untick what you do not want. If you ended up with far more media than expected, that is why. A one-page PDF skips the selection step entirely and goes straight onto the canvas.
- What you see on the canvas is a preview. It is rendered for the screen; the export uses the original.
The file will not open
- It is password protected or encrypted. This is the most likely cause if the picker simply closes with no message — the app cannot prompt for a password. Remove the protection in the tool that made it, or print it to a new PDF without protection, then import that.
- It is damaged. Open it in a PDF reader first. If the reader struggles, so will Docuslice.
- It is not really a PDF. A file renamed to
.pdfis not a PDF.
Pages import blank or partly blank
- Unusual page boxes. A PDF with a large media box and a small visible area can render mostly empty. Crop the PDF in another tool and re-export it.
- Very complex vector pages — detailed maps, CAD drawings — can take a long time or fail to render. Export the page as a high-resolution PNG or JPEG from the source application and import that instead. You lose the vector benefit and gain a file that works.
- Layers or transparency groups that rely on features the renderer does not support may drop out. Flattening the PDF in the source tool fixes it.
The PDF is enormous and slow to import
In the browser and desktop apps the file is held in memory so the original can be retained for vector export, which is what makes a very large PDF slow there. On Android and iOS it is kept on disk instead, so size is less of a problem.
Two browser-specific limits worth knowing:
- A very large PDF may not be retained at all, in which case a vector export quietly falls back to the rasterized preview.
- The retained original does not survive a page reload. If you have reloaded since importing, re-import the PDF before a vector export.
The fallback that always works
Open the PDF in any reader, export or screenshot the page you need at the highest resolution available, and import that image. You lose vector sharpness, but for a photographic or scanned page there was none to lose.