Repair a damaged PDF
Rebuild a PDF whose structure has been damaged, and recover whatever pages are still readable.
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Select a PDF file
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Accepted formats: PDF
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Quick facts
- What it does
- Reads a damaged PDF as tolerantly as possible and writes a clean, well-formed file from what it can recover.
- Input
- Output
- Processing
- In your browser
- Files uploaded?
- No
- Account required?
- No
- Best for
- A file that one viewer refuses to open but another shows partially.
- Main limitation
- It can rebuild a broken structure; it cannot recover content that is genuinely missing from the file.
How to use this tool
- Upload the damaged PDF.
- The tool reads what it can and reports how many pages survived.
- Download the rebuilt file.
Why use iBuildPDF
A PDF that will not open is usually not destroyed — its index has been damaged, often by an interrupted download or a failed transfer. Rebuilding the index from the objects that are still present recovers the document far more often than people expect.
How it works
The file is parsed as permissively as possible, every page object that can still be read is copied into a brand new document, and a fresh cross-reference table is written. Pages that are genuinely unreadable are skipped and counted, so you know what you got back.
Frequently asked questions
Will this always work?
No, and any tool promising otherwise is overselling. If the damage is in the page content itself rather than in the index, there is nothing to recover. The tool tells you how many pages it rescued rather than claiming success either way.
My file is password protected and I have the password.
This tool cannot open encrypted files. Open it in the application that created it, remove the password there, and then repair the result.
Is my damaged file uploaded anywhere?
No. The whole repair happens inside your browser tab, which matters especially here — the files people try to repair are usually the ones they cannot afford to lose or leak.
What does "recovered 38 of 40 pages" mean?
Pages are copied across one at a time and any page that fails is skipped, so two pages of that document could not be read. The other 38 are intact in the file you download. Copying the document in one go would have failed as a unit and given you nothing.
The repaired file opens but a page looks wrong.
Then the damage is in that page's content rather than in the document's index, and there is nothing left to rebuild it from. Repair restores the structure around the pages; it cannot invent content that is no longer in the file.
Should I repair a file before using another tool on it?
It is worth trying whenever a tool reports the file as invalid. Plenty of PDFs that open in one reader have a broken index that stricter software refuses, and rebuilding them first is often the difference between a tool working and not.
Read more about this
Continue with your PDF
Your file is ready. These are the things people usually do next.