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Repair PDF

Repair a damaged PDF and recover data from corrupt PDF.

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Repair a corrupt PDF

Recover pages from a partially damaged PDF using PyMuPDF's rewrite pipeline.

Repair PDF rewrites the internal structure of a PDF that opens with errors or won't open at all. Under the hood it uses PyMuPDF to re-serialise the pages into a clean, well-formed PDF. It cannot recover pages that were physically truncated in the source (if half the file is missing, those pages are gone), but it can often restore a file that a normal viewer refuses to open.

This is a best-effort tool — some corrupt PDFs are beyond repair.

How to use it

  1. 1Upload the damaged PDF.
  2. 2Press Repair PDF.
  3. 3If pages can be recovered, they download as a fresh clean PDF.
  4. 4Open the recovered file to verify pages are readable.

Real-world use cases

  • Rescue a PDF that Adobe Reader shows as 'damaged and cannot be repaired'.
  • Recover pages from a file that was interrupted mid-download.
  • Prepare an old, malformed PDF for further tools (merge, OCR) that would otherwise refuse it.
  • Salvage what's readable from a partially-corrupt archive.

Supported formats & limits

Input: any PDF the server can partly parse. Output: a rewritten PDF containing whatever pages could be recovered.

Privacy

Your uploaded file is written to a temporary folder on our server, processed, and deleted by the operating system as soon as the request finishes — typically within seconds. Nothing is stored in our database. Traffic is encrypted over HTTPS.

Full details in the Privacy Policy.

Frequently asked questions

Will Repair recover a truncated file?▾

Only what is present. If the download was interrupted and the file physically ends mid-page, no tool can regenerate the missing bytes.

Does the tool guarantee success?▾

No. Some PDFs are corrupt beyond repair. If Repair returns an error, the file is likely unrecoverable via this method.

Will the output be identical to the original?▾

The visible content is preserved as best as possible. Some non-critical metadata may be dropped.

Can I use Repair on encrypted PDFs?▾

Unlock the file first (with the Unlock tool), then run Repair.

What kinds of PDF errors can Repair PDF actually fix?▾

It fixes broken cross-reference tables, missing xref entries, truncated streams, and files whose object structure has drifted from the PDF spec — the common causes of 'PDF cannot be opened' errors. It cannot recover content that was never in the file to begin with.

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