The imposition action doesn't work anymore after changing a page size

Symptoms

After editing the PageSizes.txt file to add a custom page size or change one of the built-in page sizes, every time I click on the "Arrange > Impose" action on the Switchboard, I get an error dialog box and the Impose action isn't shown. I have tried to uninstall and re-install pdfToolbox but that doesn't help.

Cause

The PageSize.txt file keeps all page sizes used by the Impose action in a very specific machine-readable format. Even though the file seems to contain only plain text, it defines each page size with a precise number of tab characters in between the different fields of a page size definition. If you edit the file, you have to keep to this format exactly or pdfToolbox will no longer be able to parse the file and cause the error dialog box to appear.

Uninstalling and reinstalling the software doesn't solve this problem because this file is installed in the user preferences. As it is assumed to be customizable by the user (you) the uninstaller doesn't remove the file and as a result the reinstall process doesn't reinstall a correct copy of the file.

Solution

First of all, find the PageSizes.txt file on your system:

• On Mac, the file is normally located in: Macintosh HD:users:USERNAME:Library:Preferences:callas software:callas pdfToolbox X:Actions
• On Windows, the file is normally located in: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\callas software:callas pdfToolbox X:Actions

Replace USERNAME with your actual user name on your machine and pdfToolbox X by the version of pdfToolbox you have installed. Alternatively you can also search by name for the PageSizes.txt file. In that case select the one in your preferences folder.

To fix the problem, you can do either of two things

1. Open this PageSizes.txt file and remove the offending information. For best results, use a text editor that preserves spaces and tabs and that can show invisible characters. That will make it much easier to understand the format of this file and to fix whatever error you introduced.
2. Delete the PageSizes.txt file, download the attached default file from the bottom of this article and unzip it. Then copy the included PageSizes.txt file in the location where you deleted the old file.