Repair a Damaged PDF
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Upload a PDF that will not open. The structure is rebuilt from whatever the file still contains.
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Drag & drop your PDF here
PDF only
Most PDFs that refuse to open are not badly damaged. The page content is intact and the index that points at it, the cross-reference table, has been corrupted by an interrupted download, a failed transfer or a program that wrote the file incorrectly.
Rebuilding scans the file for the objects that are still present and writes a fresh index over them. A file damaged only in its structure usually comes back complete.
Repair works from what the file still contains. It cannot invent bytes that never arrived, so a download that stopped halfway will come back short.
Damage to the file structure: a corrupted cross-reference table, a broken object index, a trailer that points at the wrong place. These are the usual reasons a viewer reports that a PDF is damaged.
Only the part that arrived. Repair rebuilds an index over the objects the file still contains; it cannot reconstruct pages whose data was never written.
Yes, where the page content survived. Repair rewrites the structure around the existing objects rather than redrawing anything, so recovered pages are identical to the originals.
Not directly. Remove the password with the Unlock PDF tool first, then repair the unprotected copy.
The tool says so rather than returning a file that opens to blank pages. A half repaired document that looks fine until you read it is worse than a clear failure.