AfroTools / Tools

PDF Repair

Rebuild damaged PDFs locally with qpdf, normalize valid-but-fragile files, and fall back to image-based page salvage when structure repair cannot recover the document.

No Upload Client-side Batch ZIP Diagnostics
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Used only inside your browser for encrypted PDFs.
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Repair Report
How PDF Repair Works
This tool attempts repair in layers, starting with structural repair and ending with visual page salvage if the file is still readable.
  • Checks headers, xref, trailer, EOF marker, encryption, and object hints
  • Uses local qpdf/WASM to rebuild damaged structure
  • Normalizes valid PDFs with compatibility-friendly output
  • Can rasterize recoverable pages into a fresh PDF when structure repair fails
Works best on: damaged headers, broken cross-reference tables, incomplete downloads, extra bytes before the PDF header, and PDFs that open in browsers but fail in stricter readers.
Privacy
Your file never leaves your device. All processing happens locally in your browser using JavaScript. No data is uploaded to any server.

The PDF Repair tool attempts to fix damaged files that fail to open in strict readers. It inspects the file header, EOF marker, xref and trailer hints, encryption markers, and page recovery signals, then tries a local qpdf rebuild, a pdf-lib compatibility save, and an optional raster-page salvage. Your PDFs are processed entirely in your browser and can be downloaded individually, bundled as a ZIP, or documented with a JSON or CSV repair report.

Frequently Asked Questions

It can often recover PDFs with extra bytes before the PDF header, broken cross-reference tables, incomplete trailers, missing EOF markers, and fragile object streams. It works best when the page content still exists somewhere inside the file.
No. The entire repair process runs locally in your browser using JavaScript. Your file never leaves your device and no data is sent to any server. This ensures complete privacy for sensitive documents.
Raster salvage renders each readable page as an image and places those images into a new PDF. It can rescue a document that still displays, but the resulting file is image-based and may lose selectable text, links, forms, and tags.
Repair can fail when the file is not a PDF, the page data is missing, the file is heavily truncated, or an encrypted document needs a password that was not provided. Try re-downloading the original file if possible.
Structural rebuilds should preserve recoverable content closely. Raster salvage prioritizes readability over editability, so the page appearance is preserved as images while selectable text and form behavior may not survive.