Repair PDF

Repair PDF

Open a damaged PDF again, and see honestly how much of it came back.

Repair a damaged PDF for free in your browser. Almost every PDF that will not open has the same problem: the table at the end of the file that says where everything lives is wrong, missing, or was never finished. The pages and the text are usually still there. This tool tries three ways of getting them back, from a faithful rewrite to pulling surviving pages out of a file that was cut off mid download, tells you which one worked and how many pages you got, and never hands back a file it has not opened itself first. Nothing is uploaded: the document never leaves your device.

①Select file→②Scan→③Download
Private
Stays on Device
Instant

When this helps

  • A reader says the file is damaged and offers to try recovering it
  • A download or a transfer stopped partway and the file will not open
  • A PDF opens in one program and is refused by another
  • A file arrived by email with something prepended to it
  • An old archived document that no current reader will accept
  • A form or report exported by a tool that wrote a broken index

What you get

  • ✓It Tells You How Much Came Back - When only part of a file survived, you get the page count, not a green tick. A repair tool that hides a loss is worse than one that failed
  • ✓Checked Before You Get It - Every result is opened and counted here before it is offered, so a file that still would not open is reported as a failure instead of downloaded as a fix
  • ✓Three Attempts, Not One - A faithful rewrite, then a full reparse, then pulling the surviving pages out by hand. Each one recovers files the one before it gives up on
  • ✓Nothing Leaves Your Device - A damaged file is still your file. This runs entirely in your browser, with no upload and no copy kept anywhere

Privacy First:

Your PDF is read and rebuilt inside your browser. No upload, no server, no copy kept anywhere. Close the tab and nothing remains.

Questions about repairing PDFs

Can you recover a file that was cut off mid download?
The pages that arrived, yes. The ones that did not, no, and nobody can: those bytes are not in the file. Most tools return nothing at all here, because the file's own page list names pages that are missing and every parser stops at the first one. This one ignores that list, collects the pages that are complete, and builds a new document from them, then tells you it recovered, say, two of the three pages the file claimed.
Will the repaired file look the same?
When the repair is a rewrite or a rebuild, yes, exactly the same: measured on real documents the rendered pages differ by zero. A salvage is different by nature, because it returns only the pages that survived, and a page whose content was past the cut comes back blank.
Nothing here worked. Is there anything else to try?
If you still have whatever produced the file, exporting it again will beat any repair, because the original data is there and here it is not. If the file came from a download, downloading it again is worth more than any tool. Repair is for when the source is gone.
Why does it say nothing was wrong when my reader will not open the file?
The structure checked out, so the problem is elsewhere: a password, a font your reader cannot handle, or the reader itself. Download the rewritten copy and try it anyway, since a rewrite normalises plenty of small things this check does not name. If it is password protected, unlock it first.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. All three repair attempts run in your browser: one is qpdf compiled to WebAssembly in a worker, the other two are JavaScript. Nothing is sent anywhere, which matters here because a file you are trying to rescue is usually one you cannot replace.
Can it repair a password protected PDF?
Not directly. Unlock it first with the Unlock PDF tool, then repair the result. Both steps run in your browser and neither one uploads the file.
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Once it opens again, compress it or split out the pages you still need.

You might also need:

Compress
Split
Sanitize PDF