Repair PDF

Get something usable out of a broken PDF

A corrupted PDF is frustrating in a specific way: the file exists, the filename is right, but every reader you try either fails to open it or opens it to a blank screen. Corruption usually happens for mundane reasons — an interrupted download, a cloud sync conflict, a partially written upload that got cut off mid-byte, a drive error that truncated the file, or a buggy app that wrote invalid PDF syntax in the first place. Whatever the cause, what you need is a tool that tries to extract whatever is still intact and rebuild a working PDF from it.

The OkFarsi Repair PDF tool runs two recovery passes. The first pass uses qpdf to walk the file's cross-reference table, rebuild any damaged internal pointers, and re-emit a syntactically valid PDF. Most 'this file is damaged' errors come from cross-reference table corruption and are fixed by this pass alone. The second pass, applied only when the first doesn't fully succeed, uses pdftk's more aggressive recovery mode to salvage individual page streams from a file where the top-level structure is too damaged to trust. Between the two passes, most recoverable PDFs come out as readable documents.

Repair is best-effort, not magical. If the file was truncated mid-page, the recovered PDF will be missing pages after the truncation point. If an image stream inside a page is scrambled, the page may appear with blank or broken image areas while the text around it recovers cleanly. A report at the end of the job tells you what was recovered and what couldn't be — so you know exactly what you're working with.

How to repair a damaged PDF

1. Gather whatever copies you have

   If the PDF came from a cloud service, a download, or an email, check those sources for an earlier version or a re-download option. Repairing a file that can simply be re-fetched wastes time you don't have to spend.

2. Upload the damaged PDF

   Drop the file into the upload area. The tool inspects the file's header and cross-reference structure before committing to a recovery pass.

3. Let the first recovery pass run

   qpdf rebuilds the structural metadata and re-emits the PDF. For files with only cross-reference damage, this pass alone produces a clean result.

4. Run the deep recovery pass if needed

   When structural recovery isn't enough, the tool falls back to page-stream salvage with pdftk. This takes longer but recovers readable pages from files where the first pass gives up.

5. Review the recovery report and download

   The report lists what was recovered cleanly, what was partial, and what was unrecoverable. Download the rebuilt PDF and open it to confirm the recovered pages are readable before deleting the original broken copy.

Common use cases

• Interrupted downloads

  Recover a PDF whose download was cut short, leaving a file that exists on disk but can't be opened because the tail was never written.

• Cloud sync conflicts

  Rescue the content from a file where a sync conflict left the bytes in an inconsistent state — cross-reference damage is very common in this scenario.

• Old archive files

  Attempt to read a decade-old PDF where an outdated generator or a subtle disk issue left the file just barely invalid for modern readers.

• Bad email attachments

  Recover from a PDF that was damaged in transit or mangled by a filtering service that rewrote the bytes unsafely.

Privacy & security

Recovery runs on isolated workers inside our infrastructure. The tool reads the file's structure and page streams as part of the repair process; it doesn't extract or retain text for indexing, analysis, or training. Both the uploaded broken file and the rebuilt output are removed from our servers shortly after your download completes. Only an anonymous job identifier is kept for operational metrics. If the PDF was confidential before the corruption, it's still confidential after — download promptly and clear local temp copies.

Frequently asked questions