PDF Repair Pre-Check
Decide fast whether a broken PDF can be saved or just needs re-downloading.
PDF Repair Pre-Check
Confirm a PDF has a valid header, cross-reference table, and end marker — and whether it is worth trying to recover.
Report
The PDF report appears here.
When to use this
Use it when a PDF “won’t open”, opens to a blank page, or a tool refuses to merge/split it. Before you reach for a recovery app, this tells you the basic structure is sound (just a viewer quirk) or genuinely broken (truncated download, missing cross-reference). That distinction saves you from wasting time on a file that can’t be fixed.
Worked example
A statement PDF opens to page 1 then fails. You drop it in: header and %%EOF are present but startxref is missing, so the tool flags an incomplete cross-reference table. You re-download from the bank — now all three markers are present and it opens fully. Or: a 0-byte-looking file has no %PDF- at all, telling you immediately it isn’t really a PDF.
What it can and can’t recover
This is a structural diagnosis, not a repair. Browsers cannot rewrite PDF internals, so the tool won’t stitch a broken file back together. What it does is tell you the likely cause and whether re-downloading (the usual fix) is the right move versus a genuine recovery job. Pair it with the PDF Encryption Check if the file also asks for a password.
FAQ
It says truncated — can you recover it? Not in the browser. Re-download from the source. If the source is gone, desktop recovery utilities may salvage readable pages, but results vary.
Why does page count say “~”? It estimates by counting page objects in the first 5 MB. Very large or image-only PDFs may under-count; treat it as a sanity signal, not a precise total.
Is the file uploaded? No. The scan runs entirely on your device.