A PDF gets corrupted in transit, on a failing drive, or because the program that wrote it stopped halfway. The content is often intact: what is broken is the table telling the reader where each object lives.
How it works
Drop your file on the page, or click to pick it from your folders.
Start the job. It runs inside your browser: nothing is sent to a server.
Download the result. No account, no watermark, no queue.
When this really helps
Recover a document you received
An attachment your reader refuses to open.
Save an archived file
An old document pulled off a tired disk.
Unblock printing
A PDF that displays but crashes on print.
What the conversion keeps, and what it loses
Working inside a browser comes with limits a hosted service does not have. Here they are in plain words, so you know what to expect before you start.
What is kept
- Every readable page
- Selectable text, when the structure can be recovered
- Page size and orientation
- Images
What is not carried over
- Whatever is physically missing from a truncated file
- Forms and their fields
- Selectable text, if the rendering route was needed
- Bookmarks and links
Worth knowing about the format
pdf.js tolerates broken cross-reference tables, unclosed objects and wrong lengths, where most readers give up. It is used here as a filter: whatever it manages to read, pdf-lib writes back cleanly.
Not the right tool?
- Compress a PDF — Si le fichier réparé est devenu lourd.
- PDF → text — Pour au moins récupérer le texte d'un document irrécupérable.
- Organise pages — Pour vérifier page à page ce qui a été sauvé.
Why it's free
Online converters receive your file on their servers, process it, then promise to delete it. Every document costs them computing time: that is why they charge, and why they cap file sizes.
Here, the work happens on your own computer. The page contains no server code: your document cannot be received, because it is never sent. So there is nothing to bill, nothing to cap, and nothing to delete afterwards. Cut your connection once the page has loaded — everything keeps working.
Frequently asked questions
Can every PDF be repaired?
No. A truncated file has lost bytes no tool can invent. An inconsistent structure, which is the common case, can almost always be rebuilt.
Will my text stay selectable?
Yes if the structure can be recovered, which is the usual outcome. If it cannot, pages are redrawn from their rendering and the text becomes an image — the tool flags it.
What if the document asks for a password?
Run it through the unlock tool first, entering the password you already know.
Other tools
Edit the text in a PDF — Fix a line that is already written, even on a scanned document. This is the feature other services charge for, and the natural starting point when you need to retouch before converting.