Interrupted downloads, faulty exporters and failing drives leave PDFs that refuse to open or show errors. Repair PDF works in stages: first it rebuilds the document’s internal index with QPDF, then it recovers every readable object one by one, and only if both fail does it re-render the pages that can still be read.
How to repair a damaged PDF
- Choose the damaged PDF.
- Keep Automatic, or pick a specific method.
- Repair and download. A report shows which method worked.
Good to know
- Every repaired file is opened again before you get it, so you only receive output that actually works.
- The first two methods keep text, links and fonts intact. The last resort turns pages into images – run OCR PDF afterwards to make the text searchable again.
- Data that is genuinely missing from a truncated file cannot be recreated – the tool recovers what is still there.
Frequently asked questions
Can every corrupted PDF be fixed?
No tool can promise that. If the file is mostly intact, structure problems are usually fixable; if most of the data is missing, it cannot be recovered.
Why does my PDF say “damaged and could not be repaired”?
That is often a broken cross-reference table, which this tool rebuilds.
Is my file uploaded?
No. Repair runs on your device using QPDF compiled to WebAssembly, pdf-lib and PDF.js.