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Repair Corrupt PDF
Rebuild a damaged PDF so it opens again.
Processed locally — your files never leave your device
How to use Repair PDF
- 1
Open the PDF that won't open elsewhere.
- 2
Click Repair — the tool first rebuilds the file's structure, then falls back to re-rendering if needed.
- 3
Download the recovered document.
- 4
Check it page by page — recovery is best-effort by nature.
About this tool
PDFs break in mundane ways: a download cut off at 99%, an email gateway that mangled the attachment, a crashed program that never finished writing, a USB stick removed too soon. Often the actual content survives — what's broken is the file's index (the cross-reference table) or its trailer, the bits a strict viewer reads first. That's why one viewer may shrug while another refuses entirely.
This tool tries two strategies in order. First, a lenient structural rebuild: parse the file forgivingly, skip invalid objects, reconstruct the index, and write a clean new file — when this works, everything is preserved, including selectable text. If the damage defeats parsing, the fallback uses a more tolerant rendering engine to recover whatever pages can still be drawn and re-renders them into a new PDF — visually intact, though text selectability is lost.
Set expectations honestly: repair recovers what's recoverable. If the bytes containing your content were never written or are truly destroyed, nothing can bring them back — but for the common cases (truncation, broken xref, bad trailer), the success rate is high. Your damaged original is never modified, so trying costs nothing.
Frequently asked questions
What kinds of damage can be fixed?
Broken cross-reference tables, damaged trailers, truncated downloads and invalid objects — the common failure modes. These are index-level problems where the content itself survived.
What can't be fixed?
Content that was never written or was overwritten — if the bytes holding page data are gone, no software can reconstruct them. Encrypted files also need their password before repair can be attempted.
Will the repaired file keep selectable text?
If the structural rebuild succeeds (the common case), yes — everything is preserved. If the fallback re-rendering was needed, pages are images; the result notes which path was taken.
The repaired file is missing pages — why?
Those pages' data couldn't be recovered. The tool saves every page it can read rather than failing entirely — partial recovery beats none.