About Repair PDF
A PDF that will not open is unnerving, especially when it is the only copy. The causes are ordinary. A download stopped partway. An editor crashed while saving. An email gateway rewrote the attachment. A USB stick was pulled out too early. In each case the pages are very often still in the file, and what is damaged is the index that tells a reader where to find them.
This tool tries to read the file the way a forgiving reader would, and write out whatever it can recover as a fresh, working PDF. It runs in your browser, so the damaged file is not uploaded anywhere, which is worth knowing when the file you cannot open is a sensitive one.
How to repair a PDF
- Choose the PDF that will not open. It does not need to look like a PDF; a file that was renamed or cut short can still be tried.
- Press the button. The tool first tries to rebuild the document properly, around the pages it can find, keeping the text as text.
- Read the result line. If it rebuilt the file, it reports how many pages it recovered and that the text is intact.
- If the file’s structure could not be read at all, the tool falls back to recovering each page as a picture. In that case the result line says so plainly, and the text in the recovered file is no longer text.
- Open the preview to see what came back, then save it. Check that the page count matches what you expected.
When you would use it
- Opening a file that a download manager left incomplete.
- Recovering a document after an editing program crashed mid-save.
- Getting a usable copy of an attachment that your mail system or a file transfer mangled.
- Rescuing a file that one viewer refuses but another half-opens, so that you can send a clean copy on.
- Producing a fresh file from one that opens with errors, before you merge, split or sign it.
What it will not do
- It cannot restore what is genuinely missing. A file cut off at 60 per cent has lost the last 40 per cent; the tool recovers the part that is there.
- The picture fallback is a last resort. The pages look right but cannot be searched or selected, and the file is usually larger. You can run OCR PDF on the result to make the words searchable again.
- It will not get past a password. A file that is locked to open needs the password; see Unlock PDF.
- It cannot repair something that is not a PDF at all, such as a different file type with the wrong ending.
- Form fields, links and other interactive parts may not survive a rebuild, particularly in the picture fallback.
How it compares
Opening the file in a different viewer is the first thing to try, and it costs nothing. Some viewers are more tolerant than others, and one of them may display it. If any of them can open it, you can print that view to a new PDF as a quick rescue.
Desktop repair utilities and some paid editors do deeper recovery on very badly damaged files. For the common cases of a truncated download or a bad index, a rebuild like this one is quick, and having it run in the browser means the damaged document does not have to be sent anywhere.
Tips
- If you can, download the file again before repairing it. A fresh, complete copy beats a recovered one.
- Keep the damaged original until you have checked the repaired file page by page.
- If the repaired file came back as pictures, a quick pass with OCR gives you searchable text again.