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Does anyone have any recommendation or procedures for repairing a corrupt PDF? When I open the file I get "There was an error opening this document. the file is damaged and cannot be repaired." There seems to be a myriad of tools out there but none that I could describe as reputable. Are there any opensource linux based solutions for this possibly?

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Opensource PDF tools tend to be pretty crappy, I'm afraid. What are you using? – Satanicpuppy May 3 '11 at 14:38
Also see: superuser.com/questions/166999/… – slhck♦ May 3 '11 at 14:39
didnt like the look of any of the tools as they looked like the myriad of "Registry Cleaners" out there that are useless. Have been trying Adobe Pro and have just started looking if Ghostscript or PDFForge have any repair switches. – Tim Alexander May 3 '11 at 14:48
Ghostscript is okay, but it's certainly not better than Acrobat. It's completely bare bones. – Satanicpuppy May 3 '11 at 18:41
@Satanicpuppy I disagree :: I use ghostscript to rebuild damaged or low-quality pdfs quite often and it performs very well. – Eddie B Feb 5 at 20:16

1 Answer

up vote 15 down vote accepted

Ghostscript will repair your corrupted PDF automatically... if it can open it in the first place (that is, if it is not damaged beyond repair). But afterwards you'll still need to double-check the result...

On Linux, try this command:

 gs \
  -o repaired.pdf \
  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
  -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress \
   corrupted.pdf

On Windows, try this one:

 gswin32c.exe ^
  -o repaired.pdf ^
  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
  -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress ^
   corrupted.pdf
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Ghostscript does a fantastic job of rendering pdfs ... I regularly use gs to rebuild pdfs to improve font quality. – Eddie B Feb 5 at 20:14

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