Repair a damaged PDF
Rebuild a damaged PDF that will not open.
Drop your file here
Processed securely and deleted within the hour.
Most "damaged" PDFs are not really damaged
A PDF ends with a cross-reference table — an index recording where every object sits in the file. Readers use it to jump straight to a page rather than scanning the whole document.
That index is fragile. An interrupted download, a save that failed halfway, a file edited by careless software, or a transfer that dropped the last few kilobytes will all break it. The content is usually still there in full; the map to it is gone, and the reader gives up.
Repairing means scanning the file for objects and rebuilding the index from what is actually present. Files that will not open at all frequently come back complete.
What it cannot recover
Content that genuinely is not in the file. A download that stopped at 60% contains 60% of the pages, and no repair produces the rest. The result reports the page count it recovered so you can check nothing is missing — which is more useful than a confident success message over a document that lost its last chapter.
If the file was downloaded, downloading it again is worth trying before anything else. A truncated transfer is by far the most common cause.
Repairing also cleans up
Rebuilding rewrites the document's structure from scratch, which quietly fixes duplicate objects, orphaned references and inconsistencies that were slowing readers down. A repaired file often opens faster even when it opened fine before.
Encrypted files
Supply the password. A damaged encrypted file needs to be opened before it can be rebuilt.
Common questions
Why will my PDF not open?
Usually a broken cross-reference table — the index of where objects live. The content is normally still there.
Can it recover a partial download?
It recovers the pages that arrived. Content that never downloaded cannot be reconstructed.
How do I know if anything is missing?
The result reports how many pages were recovered. Compare it against what you expect.
Will it fix a password-protected file?
Yes, if you supply the password — it has to be opened before it can be rebuilt.
Does repairing change anything else?
It rewrites the structure, which removes orphaned objects. Content is unchanged.