Repair a damaged PDF
When a viewer says the file is damaged, a rebuild often brings it back.
- 1Add the PDF that will not open.
- 2Repair.
- 3Download and check the result.
Good things start with a file.
Drop PDFs or images here, or choose from your device.
Rendering page previews…
This PDF looks password-protected, so we can't show page previews here. Type the page numbers instead, or unlock it first.
Add at least two PDFs to merge.
This tool is still in development. You can arrange files locally; nothing is uploaded until it opens.
Files are uploaded over an encrypted, single-use link, processed on our own servers and deleted within one hour.
Need a different tool?
Try “merge”, “JPG to PDF” or “sign”. We list PDF tools we are building, not every format pair.
Rebuilds the index
Most “damaged” PDFs have a broken cross-reference table. We scan the file for objects and write a fresh, consistent structure.
Cleans as it goes
Unreferenced objects are dropped and streams are recompressed, so the repaired file is often smaller too.
No miracles
If page content or fonts are physically missing, no tool can invent them. We tell you it failed instead of returning an empty page.
Repair a damaged PDF: what to expect
PDFs break in predictable ways: an interrupted download truncates the end of the file, a buggy generator writes a wrong offset table, an email gateway mangles line endings. In all these cases the actual content is usually intact and only the index is wrong.
Repair reads the file object by object, ignoring the broken index, and writes a new file with a correct one. This is the same recovery mode serious viewers use internally, made explicit and saved to disk.
What repair cannot do is restore data that is not there. A file cut off in the middle keeps the pages before the cut. If the result is missing pages, the missing pages were missing from the input.
Questions, answered
- Will it fix every broken PDF?
- No. It fixes structural damage, which is the common case. Missing content cannot be recovered.
- Is content changed?
- Page content is copied as-is. Only the file structure is rebuilt and streams recompressed losslessly.
- Why is the repaired file smaller?
- Dead objects are removed and streams recompressed. Nothing visible is lost.
- My PDF opens but a viewer complains. Should I repair it?
- Yes, that is exactly the case: the content is fine and the structure is not.
- Can it recover a password-protected file?
- No. Use Unlock PDF with the password first.