Why Do I Need to be Careful Naming the PDF Attachments for My Application?

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Electronic systems can be a little finicky when presented with file names that include unexpected characters. Take care to follow the directions in the NIH application guide to ensure smooth processing of your application. PDF file names should be less than 50 characters, including punctuation and spaces. File names can contain any of the following characters: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, underscore, hyphen, space, period, parenthesis, curly braces, square brackets, tilde, exclamation point, comma, semicolon, apostrophe, at sign, number sign, dollar sign, percent sign, plus sign, and equal sign. While single spaces are allowed between words or characters in the file name, do not use two or more spaces in a row between words or characters as this will cause errors. File names should NOT contain ampersands (“&”).

For more tips on creating your PDFs for your text attachments, visit our page on PDF guidelines.

5 Comments

  1. The list of acceptable characters above includes apostrophes. Perhaps that is a more recent change. We have encountered errors in the past if file names contained an apostrophes.

  2. The apostrophes still cause errors. Just submitted an application yesterday and got error messages saying: Valid filenames may only include the following characters: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, underscore ( _ ), hyphen (-), space, or period. No special characters (including brackets) can be part of the filename.
    I’ll be sticking to the original rules from now on.

  3. I was saving a number of PDF files to our server, using Adobe Reader DC. The file name structure was “WO# 123” and “PO# 1234-12-12345”. When I look in my directories now I see files named “WO” and “PO”, they show now file extension. I believe something has truncated the filename and copied one file over the next until there was only one file remaining.
    Do you know of any reason for this? I have been using this structure for 2 years and this only started showing up this week.

    1. I came across this same error just recently. I never had this issue before I don’t know what changed after 3 yrs of naming my files with a # in them. but what if found is that if I named a file with the # sign in a file name I was unable to quick view( preview) the document but if I was to double click the document the file was there . so what I did was take the # symbol out and replaced it with at – dash and now I am able to quick view or use the preview pane. hopefully this helps

      1. I have just encountered the same problem at the beginning of March 2022. All of our company invoices are saved as such: #invoice number. So now I can no longer preview any of our files for the last 20 years. It is very very frustrating. I ran a repair on my Adobe and it let me view them in the preview until I restarted my PC.

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