I recently ran into a problem with a PDF. It was a large document for a colleague and it had lots of images, characters and scientific text. In trying to create a PDF, using Adobe Acrobat Pro, the process would fail and spit out a log of errors. I tried a few different ways to create the PDF and all failed.
Searching around online I found a few strings that suggested the fonts and the images were to blame. I changed fonts and was able to get a little further in the PDF creation, but still failure. Short of telling the person to re-create this 50+ page document or lose the images I sought one last solution. Several of the threads online suggested people try a free program, PDFCreator. I was hesitant at first but was out of options.
The download for PDFCreator was simple and harmless (available at http://www.pdfforge.org/). I opened the document and was able to print to PDFCreator. And it worked. All 50+ pages, no problems, no errors. Honestly it looked like it worked much faster than similar documents using Adobe Acrobat. Best of all it worked and I was able to forward a PDF back to my colleague. It is worth a look if you need a PDF program or have a problem in Acrobat Pro.