Repair a damaged PDF
Most unopenable PDFs are not really damaged; their index is. Parsing the file loosely and writing a fresh one with a rebuilt cross-reference table fixes the large majority. When it does not, the pages are recovered as images instead of being lost.
The file is parsed with error checking relaxed and written out with a fresh cross-reference table. If the structure is beyond rewriting, every page that still renders is recovered as an image instead — the result always tells you which happened.
Even a file your reader refuses is worth trying — the parser is deliberately tolerant of invalid objects.
The document is parsed with error checking relaxed, then written out with a fresh cross-reference table and rebuilt object streams.
The result tells you which path it took: a structural rewrite that keeps everything, or an image-based recovery that keeps the pages but loses the text layer.
Open it in your reader to confirm before deleting the original.
A PDF ends with a table saying where every object lives. Truncated downloads, interrupted saves and buggy generators leave that table wrong, and a strict reader refuses the file even though the content is intact. Rebuilding it from scratch is the fix.
If the structure is too damaged to rewrite, every page that still renders is captured as an image and assembled into a new document. You lose the text layer and any interactivity, but you keep a readable file — usually better than nothing.
If the page content streams themselves are corrupt, or the file is truncated mid-document, the missing bytes are simply gone. No tool can invent them. In that case the result will be short, and that is the honest answer.
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