How to repair a corrupted PDF

  1. 1

    Upload your damaged PDF

    Upload the PDF file that won't open or displays errors in your PDF reader.

  2. 2

    Run repair

    Click Repair PDF. Our tool attempts to recover the document structure and rebuild a valid PDF.

  3. 3

    Download the repaired file

    If recovery is successful, download the repaired PDF.

About PDF repair tool

PDF files can become corrupted through incomplete downloads, storage errors, failed email transfers, or software crashes mid-save. A corrupted PDF may fail to open, display garbled content, or cause PDF readers to crash. DocumentFlipper's repair tool attempts to recover as much of the document as possible and produce a valid, openable PDF.

The repair process reconstructs the PDF's internal structure by analysing the remaining readable data and rebuilding broken cross-reference tables, object streams, and page trees. For mildly corrupted files, full recovery is often possible. For severely damaged files, the tool may recover partial content — some pages or embedded resources may not be recoverable.

Your file is processed on our secure server and deleted within two hours regardless of whether the repair succeeds.

Frequently asked questions

What types of damage can this repair?
Structural issues like corrupted cross-reference tables, malformed object streams, and encoding problems. Ghostscript rebuilds the PDF from scratch using all readable data.
What can't it repair?
Severely truncated files (incomplete downloads), password-protected files without the password, and physically corrupted data from disk errors. These cases will return an error.
Will I lose any content?
Content in corrupted objects may be lost, but all readable content is preserved. In most cases, the repaired PDF looks identical to the original.
Is there a file size limit?
Free users can repair PDFs up to 100 MB. Files are processed securely and deleted from our servers within 2 hours.
How do I know if my PDF is corrupted?
Common signs: the file won't open, shows a blank or partial page, your PDF reader says 'file is damaged', or the download was interrupted. Upload it here and Ghostscript will attempt to rebuild the structure.