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?– SatanicpuppyCommented May 3, 2011 at 14:38
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Also see: superuser.com/questions/166999/…– slhckCommented May 3, 2011 at 14:39
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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.– user15968Commented May 3, 2011 at 14:48
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Ghostscript is okay, but it's certainly not better than Acrobat. It's completely bare bones.– SatanicpuppyCommented May 3, 2011 at 18:41
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11@Satanicpuppy I disagree :: I use ghostscript to rebuild damaged or low-quality pdfs quite often and it performs very well.– Edward J BeckettCommented Feb 5, 2013 at 20:16
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6 Answers
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
answered May 11, 2011 at 12:47
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4Ghostscript does a fantastic job of rendering pdfs ... I regularly use gs to rebuild pdfs to improve font quality. Commented Feb 5, 2013 at 20:14
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3The /prepress make the quality really good compared to /screen. Thanks.– DolanorCommented Sep 13, 2015 at 22:17
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1I get "An error occurred while reading an XREF table." What does that mean?– GeremiaCommented Jun 18, 2019 at 15:26
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It means the internal table of contents (what PDFs have to contain as XREF table) had an error, pointing to a wrong byte offset for a PDF object. Ghostscript very likely repaired that error and inserted a correct XREF table into the output. You can check this by running the output through Ghostscript one more time and see if this message still appears. Commented Jun 18, 2019 at 18:13
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2Note: According to ghostcript v9.54 documentation it is better to use
-dPDFSETTINGS=/defaultinstead of-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress.– Old ProCommented Mar 18, 2022 at 20:48
I had a corrupted PDF file, print.pdf , that Ghostscript couldn't open, but the usual graphical Linux PDF viewers (Okular, Evince) opened fine. (In my case, the file had garbage at the start instead of a PDF header, when opened in a hex editor.)
These PDF viewers use Poppler as a back-end PDF renderer. So you can repair the PDF using Poppler's command-line tools. In Ubuntu these are in the poppler-utils package. I used:
pdftocairo -pdf print.pdf print_repaired.pdf
which generated a PDF file with correct headers, which tools like Ghostscript now accepted.
answered Jun 18, 2013 at 2:01
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4+1 this read my Quartz generated PDF without complaints, and immediately started generating output. Ghostscript, Adobe Acrobat Pro and others insisted on rebuilding my 120GB pdf first. Commented Dec 14, 2013 at 14:17
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This didn't work for at least one weird PDF I came across, but it seems like a good start. Commented Nov 11, 2014 at 20:00
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1Works perfectly on a PDF on which Ghostscript wanted to remove some arbitrary elements on pages. Commented Nov 22, 2014 at 16:14
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Ghostscript failed to read the document but this worked like a charm. BTW I did this on Windows using the new linux subsystem, so cool!– HyLianCommented Jun 5, 2016 at 17:44
mutool (project page, manpage)
will repair broken PDFs without printing them.
- Installation e.g. on Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install mupdf-tools - Run it like this:
mutool clean input.pdf output.pdf
mutool clean [options] input.pdf [output.pdf] [pages] The clean command pretty prints and rewrites the syntax of a PDF file. It can be used to repair broken files, expand compressed streams, filter out a range of pages, etc. If no output file is specified, it will write the cleaned PDF to "out.pdf" in the current directory.
Alternatively, there are a few tools and frameworks that can decompose/decompile PDFs into their components without rendering them. These could be useful for extracting text, scripts, and images. See this answer for a list of such tools: https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/q/1526/8210. E.g. you can try the current top answer Origami, it has a GTK-based viewer.
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7This solution works "better" than the solutions offered above or better ranked, as it does not "print" the PDF file and keeps active the links, clickable items, etc... To me, it sounds a more elegant solution than using ghostscript or cairo.– xtrCommented Jun 5, 2015 at 15:21
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3Unfortunately,
mutool cleandoesn't fix all possible errors. I have a file that has various errors in the font and content streams, and mutool will keep those errors. Commented Jun 9, 2016 at 20:52 -
1@DominikHonnef You can always try tools/frameworks that decompose the PDF and allow you to view all the parts without rendering them. That should enable you to get text, scripts, images, etc. directly. See this answer for a list of tools: reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/q/1526/8210– jmiserezCommented Jun 24, 2016 at 10:29
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1This worked better since this does not render the pdf it examinate the document.– riccs_0xCommented Oct 4, 2017 at 0:28
I had a corrupted pdf file, because the php file used to download it echoed some errors (in HTML) and NUL characters at the end.
The solution was to open the pdf with Notepad++ and remove all text after the line
%%EOF
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had same, Adobe Reader didn't open but native Mac, Chrome and Firefox PDF plugin displayed PDF file fine. Reason was also extra "NUL" at last line added during the upload.– TiloCommented Apr 8, 2014 at 19:23
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I had a PDF with two
%%EOF. I deleted everything after the first%%EOFusing a hex editor. Now everything works fine.– adjanCommented Jun 17, 2017 at 8:21
Since Chrome, Chromium and Firefox can open PDFs and can also print to PDF, that may work if they can render it correctly. That can be used too for modifying the format, number of pages, etc.
LibreOffice can also read and write PDF
GIMP can also read and write PDF, although it's not the most practical application when dealing with multi-page documents
Generally speaking if any of your installed applications can open the corrupt PDF file and you have a "Print to PDF" printer installed, you are good to go
There is Windows freeware tool PDF Fixer, which will run on Wine. I was able to get a preview of some content of a partially downloaded PDF, when the other tools mentioned here failed. But I was not able to combine it's output files to a valid PDF file (I had expected that it will produce one automatically, but that was not the case with my specific file).
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Yes, seems to be available as a downloadable as well as a web app. Commented Aug 11, 2021 at 2:57