Choose a damaged PDF — one that will not open, shows an error, or has a broken cross-reference table — and this tool rebuilds its internal structure and hands you a repaired copy. It fixes structure; it cannot recover pages or content that are already missing from the file. Runs fully in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Give a broken PDF a second chance: its cross-references and structure are rebuilt from the content that is still in the file.
100% free · No sign-up · No daily limits · No watermarks · Processed in your browser — files never leave your device
Repair a PDF that will not open or reports errors: the file’s internal structure — cross-reference tables, object streams, page tree — is rebuilt from the content still inside it, and you download the fixed copy.
A downloaded statement fails with “the file is damaged” in every reader. Its pages and text are all still inside, but the cross-reference table points at the wrong byte offsets. The repair rebuilds that table from a fresh scan of the file’s objects, and the statement opens again with every page intact.
The repair runs two engines in your browser. The QPDF engine first rewrites the file into a clean, well-formed structure, which fixes non-conforming files and structural warnings. When a file’s cross-reference index itself is broken — the commonest real-world damage — a second library reads the file tolerantly, locates the page, text, font and image objects directly, and rebuilds a fresh document from them. The done message always names the engine that succeeded.
The common, fixable kinds: broken or missing cross-reference tables, wrong byte offsets after a bad transfer or edit, damaged object streams, and files readers reject despite intact content. The unfixable kind is missing content — bytes that never arrived.
Readers navigate a PDF through its cross-reference table, an index of byte offsets. If that index is wrong, the reader is lost even though every page is present. Repair rebuilds the index by scanning the file itself.
The pages and content are the original bytes, reorganised into a clean structure. File size and internal layout change; what you read and print does not.
The open-source QPDF engine compiled for the browser — the same engine our Protect and Unlock tools use. If QPDF cannot rebuild a file, a fallback library tries a tolerant load-and-resave, and the done message names the engine that succeeded.
No. QPDF runs in your browser tab; the file never leaves your device — important, since files people repair are often financial or personal documents.