Repair a Damaged PDF
PDF won't open, or your viewer says it's damaged? Add it here. The tool rebuilds the broken parts and keeps your text, or tells you plainly if it can't.
How to repair a PDF
- 1
Choose the PDF
Pick the file that won't open. It isn't uploaded.
- 2
Click Repair PDF
The tool checks the file, rebuilds what is broken, and tells you what it found.
- 3
Download and check
Open the repaired copy and make sure the pages you need are there.
What usually goes wrong
Most broken PDFs aren't damaged everywhere. A PDF ends with an index that tells a viewer where every page, font and picture is stored. If a download stops early, an email program changes the file, or an app crashes while saving, that index is usually what breaks, and viewers refuse to open the file even though nearly everything else is fine.
The repair reads the file piece by piece without trusting the broken index, then writes a fresh, correct one. Pages, text, pictures and links come back as they were.
When a file is badly damaged
If part of the file is actually missing, for example because a download stopped halfway, that part can't be brought back. Whatever survived is kept, so check the page count after repairing.
If the structure can't be rebuilt but a viewer can still draw the pages, the tool rescues them as images. They look the same, but the text can't be selected. If nothing can be read at all, you'll see a clear message; the best fix then is to get the file again from wherever it came from.
Your files never leave your device
Your PDF is processed on your own device, so it's never uploaded.
Many online PDF sites send your file to their servers, work on it there, and keep a copy for a while. PilotPDF does the work in your browser instead. The page loads the code it needs, and your file is opened and processed on your own device. The file itself is never sent to us, so there is no copy on our side to store, leak or delete.
Read more about how this works in our privacy-by-design explainer.