Last updated on
Feb 26, 2026
|
Also applies to Acrobat Reader, Adobe Acrobat 2017, Adobe Acrobat 2020
- Acrobat User Guide
- Introduction to Acrobat
- Access Acrobat from desktop, mobile, web
- Introducing the new Acrobat experience
- What's new in Acrobat
- Keyboard shortcuts
- System Requirements
- Download Adobe Acrobat
- Download Acrobat | Enterprise term or VIP license
- Download Acrobat 64-bit for Windows
- Install Adobe Acrobat Reader | Windows
- Install Adobe Acrobat Reader | Mac OS
- Install updates for Acrobat and Reader
- Update your Acrobat to the latest version
- Download Acrobat 2020
- Release Notes | Acrobat, Reader
- Workspace
- Workspace basics
- Opening and viewing PDFs
- Working with online storage accounts
- Acrobat and macOS
- Acrobat notifications
- Grids, guides, and measurements in PDFs
- Asian, Cyrillic, and right-to-left text in PDFs
- Adobe Acrobat for Outlook
- Set Acrobat as default PDF viewer
- Explore Acrobat tools
- Workspace basics
- Creating PDFs
- Editing PDFs
- Edit text in PDFs
- Edit images or objects in a PDF
- Rotate, move, delete, and renumber PDF pages
- Edit scanned PDFs
- Enhance document photos captured using a mobile camera
- Optimizing PDFs
- PDF properties and metadata
- Links and attachments in PDFs
- PDF layers
- Page thumbnails and bookmarks in PDFs
- PDFs converted to web pages
- Setting up PDFs for a presentation
- PDF articles
- Geospatial PDFs
- Applying actions and scripts to PDFs
- Change the default font for adding text
- Delete pages from a PDF
- Edit a signed PDF | FAQ
- Scan and OCR
- Forms
- PDF forms basics
- Create a form from scratch in Acrobat
- Create and distribute PDF forms
- Fill in PDF forms
- PDF form field properties
- Fill and sign PDF forms
- Setting action buttons in PDF forms
- Publishing interactive PDF web forms
- PDF form field basics
- PDF barcode form fields
- Collect and manage PDF form data
- About forms tracker
- PDF forms help
- Send PDF forms to recipients using email or an internal server
- Combining files
- Combine or merge files into single PDF
- Rotate, move, delete, and renumber PDF pages
- Add headers, footers, and Bates numbering to PDFs
- Crop PDF pages
- Add watermarks to PDFs
- Add backgrounds to PDFs
- Working with component files in a PDF Portfolio
- Publish and share PDF Portfolios
- Overview of PDF Portfolios
- Create and customize PDF Portfolios
- Sharing, reviews, and commenting
- Share and track PDFs online
- Mark up text with edits
- Preparing for a PDF review
- Starting a PDF review
- Hosting shared reviews on SharePoint or Office 365 sites
- Participating in a PDF review
- Add comments to PDFs
- Adding a stamp to a PDF
- Approval workflows
- Managing comments | view, reply, print
- Importing and exporting comments
- Tracking and managing PDF reviews
- Saving and exporting PDFs
- Security
- Enhanced security setting for PDFs
- Securing PDFs with passwords
- Manage Digital IDs
- Securing PDFs with certificates
- Opening secured PDFs
- Removing sensitive content from PDFs
- Setting up security policies for PDFs
- Choosing a security method for PDFs
- Security warnings when a PDF opens
- Securing PDFs with Adobe Experience Manager
- Protected View feature for PDFs
- Overview of security in Acrobat and PDFs
- JavaScripts in PDFs as a security risk
- Attachments as security risks
- Allow or block links in PDFs
- Edit secured PDFs
- Electronic signatures
- Sign PDF documents
- Capture your signature on mobile and use it everywhere
- Send documents for e-signatures
- Create a web form
- Request e-signatures in bulk
- Collect online payments
- Brand your account
- About certificate signatures
- Certificate-based signatures
- Validating digital signatures
- Adobe Approved Trust List
- Manage trusted identities
- Printing
- Accessibility, tags, and reflow
- Searching and indexing
- Multimedia and 3D models
- Add audio, video, and interactive objects to PDFs
- Adding 3D models to PDFs (Acrobat Pro)
- Displaying 3D models in PDFs
- Interacting with 3D models
- Measuring 3D objects in PDFs
- Setting 3D views in PDFs
- Enable 3D content in PDF
- Adding multimedia to PDFs
- Commenting on 3D designs in PDFs
- Playing video, audio, and multimedia formats in PDFs
- Add comments to videos
- Print production tools (Acrobat Pro)
- Preflight (Acrobat Pro)
- PDF/X-, PDF/A-, and PDF/E-compliant files
- Preflight profiles
- Advanced preflight inspections
- Preflight reports
- Viewing preflight results, objects, and resources
- Output intents in PDFs
- Correcting problem areas with the Preflight tool
- Automating document analysis with droplets or preflight actions
- Analyzing documents with the Preflight tool
- Additional checks in the Preflight tool
- Preflight libraries
- Preflight variables
- Color management
- Troubleshoot
- Troubleshoot PDF printing in Acrobat and Acrobat Reader
- Adobe Acrobat license has either expired or not been activated
- Edit PDF forms created in LiveCycle Designer
- Insufficient data for an image error on Adobe Acrobat
- Resolve errors related to the AcroCEF/RdrCEF processes of Acrobat or Acrobat Reader
You can save your changes to an Adobe PDF or PDF Portfolio in the original PDF or in a copy of the PDF. You can also save individual PDFs to other file formats, including text, XML, HTML, and Microsoft Word. Saving a PDF in text format allows you to use the content with a screen reader, screen magnifier, or other assistive technology.
If you don’t have access to the source files that created an Adobe PDF, you can still copy images and text from the PDF to use elsewhere. You can also export the PDF to a reusable format, or export images in a PDF to another format.
Adobe Acrobat Reader users can save a copy of a PDF or PDF Portfolio if the creator of the document has enabled usage rights. If a document has additional or restricted usage rights, the document message bar under the toolbar area describes the assigned restrictions or privileges.
Save a PDF
Use the following method to save PDFs, including PDF Portfolios, and PDFs in which you have added comments, form field entries, and digital signatures.
- To save changes, select Save to computer from the upper right. Alternatively you can also select the hamburger menu and select Save. For macOS, select File > Save.
- To save changes to the PDF on Adobe cloud storage, select Save changes to Adobe's cloud storage icon in the Global bar.
To save the PDF on your system, select the Menu (Windows) or File (macOS) and then select Save As. Specify the name and location for the PDF and then select Save.
In Acrobat Reader, for Windows, select the hamburger menu and then select> Save As. For macOS, select File > Save as Text.
- To save a copy of a PDF Portfolio, select File >Save.
- To save a scanned PDF in the document cloud, select File > Save As > Adobe cloud storage, select the desired folder, and then select Save.
Note
Saving a digitally signed PDF invalidates the signature.
Revert to the last saved version
-
On Windows, Select Menu > Undo, Redo & More > Revert.
On macOS, select the File > Revert.
Revert changes in the PDF
On Windows, Select Menu > Undo, Redo & More > Undo.
On macOS, select the File > Undo, Redo and More > Undo.
About the Autosave feature
The Autosave feature guards against losing your work in case of a power failure by incrementally, and at regular intervals, saving file changes to a specified location. The original file is not modified. Instead, Acrobat creates an autosave file of changes, which includes all the changes you made to the open file since the last automatic save. The amount of new information that the autosave file contains depends on how frequently Acrobat saves the autosave file. If you set the autosave interval to 15 minutes, you could lose the last 14 minutes of your work if a problem occurs. Frequent automatic saving prevents loss of data, and is especially useful if you make extensive changes to a document, such as by adding comments.
You can apply autosave changes to the original files when you restart Acrobat. When you close, save manually, or revert to the last-saved version of a file, the autosave file is deleted.
Note
If you use assistive technology, such as a screen reader, you may want to disable the Autosave feature so that you don’t lose your place when the file is reloaded.
The Autosave feature won’t work in the following cases:
A document that has its security changed. You must save the document to re-enable automatic saving of document changes.
A document created using the Web Capture feature or extracted from a larger PDF (All tools > Organize Pages > Extract). You must save the document to enable automatic saving of changes.
A document displayed in a web browser or incorporated into a container document that supports Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). This document appears outside the default file system and cannot support automatic saving.
Recover lost changes
To prevent lost changes after an unexpected interruption, enable the Autosave feature, which is the default setting.
Set up automatic saving
-
In the Preferences dialog box under Categories, select Documents.
-
Select Automatically Save Document Changes To Temporary File Every xx Minutes (1-99), and specify the number of minutes.
Recover lost changes after an unexpected shutdown
-
Start Acrobat or open the file you were working on last.
-
When prompted, click Yes to open the autosave file or files. If multiple files were open, Acrobat opens all of the files for you.
-
Save the file or files with the same names as the files you were originally working on.
To control changes and quality trade-offs, use PDF Optimizer in Acrobat Pro, which makes more options available. You can also easily convert from other file formats to PDF using our online tools such as Word to PDF and Convert PDF.
