Learn how to repair a corrupt PDF file with ease using simple troubleshooting steps and specialized repair tools. Get back access to your important documents quickly!
PDF Fixer is a free tool that allows you to recover damaged or corrupted PDF documents by repairing content and XREF tables.
There are no feelings as distressing as trying to open an important document and finding that it is damaged or corrupted. If you have a PDF file that you want to recover, the first thing you need to do is think about how the problem originated.
If the PDF is corrupted because it was sent to you by email and the file did not arrive complete, or it was downloaded incorrectly, or you had a problem with your PC’s hard drive, then it is possible that the PDF is only partially corrupted or there is a problem with an XREF table.
In such cases you can use scripting applications like PDFtk and Ghostscript to try to recover it. Ghostscript takes care of regenerating XREF tables, and PDFtk tries to repair lost blocks of information. The problem is that if the document is too damaged neither of these two tools will work.
How to repair a corrupt PDF file;Recovering Corrupted PDF Documents with PDF Fixer
PDF Fixer is a free application for Windows that is able to do both, repair the content and repair the XREF table. The program analyzes the available data and tries to put together all the recoverable parts to make the document readable again.
Its operation is as simple as we can imagine:
- Download PDF Fixer from its official website .
- Once installed, open the program.
- Make sure the “Fix Content” and “Fix XREF Table” boxes are checked.
- Choose a destination folder to save the repaired file.
- Drag the corrupt PDF into the red PDF Fixer symbol.
- Once the repair process is complete, we will see a message on the screen indicating that the file has been corrected.
After doing a few tests we can confirm that the application works reasonably well with files that have been corrupted “by mistake”. However, when we have tried with a PDF that we have damaged manually (you can see how to do it in the tutorial “ How to corrupt a PDF file ”) the repair has not worked.
This is quite logical if we take into account that it is almost impossible for a machine to know what information we have manipulated in the document, making its reconstruction very difficult. In any case, an application that can be interesting if we encounter problems opening a PDF file on our PC.
Alternative: Use an online PDF repairer
If you’d rather not install any software on your computer (after all, PDF repair is usually only an emergency), try an online PDF repairer. There are several on the market, but I personally like the one from I Love PDF the best .This is a free tool that doesn’t even require registration. Just log in, click on “Select PDF File” and let it do its job.