Repair a Corrupted or Damaged PDF
Upload a PDF that won't open — we'll diagnose the damage and rebuild it right in your browser.
Drag & drop a PDF here, or click to browse
Corrupted, damaged, or won't-open PDFs — up to 100MB
About PDF Repair
PDF Repair fixes corrupted, damaged, or oddly-structured PDF files that fail to open in strict PDF tools or crash certain viewers. It runs a three-stage recovery pipeline — structural validation, tolerant rebuilding, and page rasterization — entirely in your browser, so your files never leave your device.
Features:
- Diagnoses whether your PDF is genuinely broken or just viewer-incompatible
- Rebuilds damaged structure without uploading the file to a server
- Falls back to page-image recovery for severely corrupted files
- Works on PDFs encrypted with an empty user password
How to Repair a PDF
- Upload the PDF that won't open or is showing errors
- Wait while we run a three-stage diagnosis and repair
- Review the diagnosis card to see what was wrong and what changed
- Download the repaired file, or send it straight to another tool
Frequently Asked Questions
Why won't my PDF file open?
PDFs can fail to open due to a broken cross-reference table, a truncated download, invalid objects, or a non-standard structure created by some scanners and editors. Our tool identifies which of these issues affects your file and repairs it automatically.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. PDF Repair runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript — your file is never sent anywhere, which also makes it fast and lets it work offline once the page has loaded.
Can this tool fix password-protected PDFs?
It can recover files encrypted with an empty user password (common with some scanning software), but it cannot bypass or remove a real password you don't know.
Why does my PDF open in my browser but fail in online tools?
Browsers and viewers like Chrome's built-in reader use a tolerant parser (similar to PDF.js) that overlooks many structural errors. Strict tools like pdf-lib follow the PDF specification exactly and reject the same file. PDF Repair runs both approaches — and a rasterized rebuild as a last resort — so a file that only 'half works' elsewhere can be normalized and used everywhere, including in other LazyParadise tools via Send To.
Will repairing my PDF change its content?
If your file only needed structural normalization, the content is unchanged — text, images, and formatting are preserved. Only in the rare case where the file is rebuilt from rendered pages does the appearance change.
What does 'rasterized' repair mean and why did my text stop being selectable?
Rasterized repair is the last-resort recovery path: when a file is too corrupted for either parser to read its internal structure, we render each page as an image using the same engine browsers use to display PDFs, then rebuild a new PDF from those images. This recovers the visual content, but the underlying text objects are gone, so you can no longer select or search the text — the tool warns you clearly when this happens.
Your Privacy
Your PDF is repaired entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server, so your files stay private.