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Repair a damaged or corrupt PDF, rebuild its cross-reference table, and recover readable content from broken files.
Your file is deleted from our server right after processing.
Your file is uploaded securely to run this tool, then deleted from our server immediately after processing — never stored, logged, or shared.
1. Drag-and-drop or select your file in the workspace above.
2. Adjust any options this tool shows for your document.
3. Click "Process Repair PDF" to run the conversion.
4. Download the finished file — your upload is deleted from our server right after processing.
If your PDF shows "There was an error opening this document" or refuses to open at all, Repair PDF runs it through Ghostscript at its highest-fidelity /prepress setting — the same print-ready tier Ghostscript reserves for final output, so nothing gets aggressively recompressed the way it does in Compress PDF — which re-parses the file's internal structure and rewrites it from scratch into a clean new PDF. There are no options to configure — drop in the broken file and click one button.
Ghostscript isn't running a dedicated repair algorithm here — it's reading as much of the damaged file as it can and re-serializing everything it understood, rebuilding the cross-reference table, stream dictionaries, and object links along the way. That full rewrite is what resolves most "won't open" errors, which are commonly caused by an interrupted upload, a partial download, or a disk error that truncated the file mid-write. But the process can only recover what it can actually parse: a file that's heavily truncated or missing entire object streams may still come back missing some pages rather than fully restored, and if the damage is too severe for Ghostscript to read at all, the tool reports that the file might be too heavily corrupted rather than returning a broken result.
This is a different job from Compress PDF, which only optimizes a file that already opens fine, or Unlock PDF, which removes a password from an otherwise-valid document rather than fixing structural damage. The fixed file downloads as repaired-result.pdf, and once it opens normally again, you can shrink it for sharing or convert it to PDF/A for long-term archiving.
Last updated: July 27, 2026
DocShift deletes your file from our server the moment processing finishes — nothing is stored, logged, or shared. There's nothing to install and no sign-up: your document is ready in seconds.
That message means the PDF's internal structure is damaged — a broken cross-reference table, a truncated file, or a corrupted stream — so most viewers refuse to open it. Repair PDF re-parses whatever Ghostscript can read and rewrites it into a clean new file, which resolves this error in most cases.
It rebuilds the cross-reference table and stream dictionaries by having Ghostscript re-parse and rewrite the entire file at its highest-quality setting. Heavily truncated files may still come back missing pages that Ghostscript cannot parse at all.
Yes. Repair fixes structural damage inside the file itself; Unlock PDF only removes an owner or user password from a file that already opens fine.
No. Repair uses Ghostscript's /prepress preset — a print-fidelity tier, not a compression one — so unlike Compress PDF, it does not recompress or downsample anything; it only rewrites the file's internal structure.
You will get an error saying the file might be too heavily corrupted. That means the damage goes beyond what Ghostscript's parser can read — there is no guaranteed recovery for every broken PDF.