Repair PDF
Rebuild a PDF that won't open. It fixes a broken file structure and strips the junk an email gateway can glue to the front. Everything happens on your device.
Drop the damaged PDF here
Your file stays on this device. Nothing is uploaded.
How to repair a damaged PDF
- Press “Choose a PDF file”, or drop the damaged PDF onto the box above. It is checked straight away.
- Read what was wrong with it. If the file turns out not to be damaged, the page says so.
- Press “Download repaired PDF”.
What Repair PDF does
Rebuilding a PDF that will not open: the attachment that arrives as gibberish, the file a reader rejects, the download that came through an office mail gateway and lost its header on the way.
What it does
- Strips anything glued to the front of the file, which is the most common reason a PDF simply will not open
- Rebuilds the file's internal index by copying every page into a fresh document
- Keeps text as text, links as links and images as images, so nothing is flattened into a picture
- Tells you when a file is already fine, instead of rebuilding it and calling that a repair
What it does not do
- Recover a PDF that is cut short; the content is missing rather than damaged, and no tool can conjure it back
- Rasterise the pages to force a result, which is how a repair silently destroys the document it fixed
- Recover a file that is not a PDF at all, whatever the extension says
- Remove a password; that is Unlock PDF, and an encrypted file is not a damaged one
Last updated
Need to send this to someone?
Our sister site QRSansar hosts a document and gives you a short link and a QR code for it. That is handy for WhatsApp, a slide, a poster or a printed handout, and it avoids attachment size limits entirely. You can swap the file later and the link and QR code keep working.
Worth being clear about the difference: that is a hosting service, so your file is uploaded to it. Everything on PDFsansar stays on your device; sharing is the one job that cannot.
Share a document on QRSansar →Other tools
All free, and all run in this tab without uploading anything.
Repair PDF: common questions
It says my PDF isn't damaged, but it won't open on my computer.
Then the file is sound and the problem is at the other end. The commonest causes are an old reader that predates something the PDF uses, a download that finished but got quarantined, or an app that was never going to open it. Drag the file onto a browser tab: if it renders there, the PDF is fine and it is the other application to look at. Rebuilding a healthy file would change it without fixing anything, which is why this tool declines rather than handing you a download and letting you assume it worked.
What does it actually repair?
Two things, both structural. First, it strips anything glued to the front of the file. Mail gateways and misconfigured downloads sometimes leave headers there, and a PDF that does not start with its own header will not open anywhere. Second, it rebuilds the file's internal index, the table that says where every object lives. A wrong or damaged index is what produces most “cannot open” errors, and copying every page into a fresh document regenerates it from scratch.
My PDF is cut short. Can you get anything back?
Not honestly, and neither can anything else. A truncated PDF is missing the content itself, not just the index pointing at it. The pages are absent rather than damaged, so there is nothing to recover from. We tested this against the most tolerant readers available and they fail on it too. The fix is to fetch the file again: if it was downloaded, the download stopped early; if it was emailed, ask for it as a fresh attachment rather than a forward.
Will repairing lose my text, links or form fields?
No. The pages are copied as they are: text stays selectable, links stay clickable, images stay images. Some repair tools render every page to a picture, which always “succeeds” and quietly destroys the document: you get a file that opens and can no longer be searched, selected or read aloud. This does not do that, which is also why it admits defeat on files that cannot genuinely be rebuilt.
Is it safe to send a damaged file here?
It never leaves your device, so there is nothing to send. The repair runs in your browser, on your machine, which matters more than usual for this tool. A PDF that will not open is often exactly the one somebody is anxious about, and the ordinary advice of “try an online repair service” means uploading a document you cannot even inspect first.