Phenquestions
PDF Fixer is a free portable program for Microsoft Windows devices designed to repair PDF documents that are corrupt and cannot be opened anymore in PDF viewers.
Having to deal with PDF documents that won't open in PDF viewers is quite a frustrating experience, especially if you need to view the file or at least gain access to its content somehow.
PDF Fixer is a straightforward tool for Windows devices to repair PDF documents. It is compatible with Windows XP and newer versions of Windows, including Windows 10. The program is offered as a portable version that you can run on any supported version of Windows right away, and has no third-party program dependencies.
Just drag & drop damaged PDF files on the interface to try a repair. You may drop a single file or multiple files for batch repairs.
PDF documents that you drop on the program interface are loaded before the program attempts the repair. The developers explain how that works on the official program homepage:
PDF Fixer is a free PDF repair utility which repairs corrupt PDF files by restructuring the damaged PDF data, rebuilding XREF tables and then restore these damaged PDF documents into readable PDF files.
PDF Fixer combines the repair capabilities of PDFTK (PDF Toolkit) and Ghostscript. Both free programs support the repairing of PDF files but use different techniques that fall short sometimes.
PDFTK (PDF Toolkit) and Ghostscript are two free PDF command-line tools and both of them have the PDF repair function, but PDFTK can only repair PDF information problems, while Ghostscript can only regenerate XREF tables. Once you need to repair a really damaged PDF document, you will find that neither PDFTK nor Ghostscript can recover the file data.
PDF Fixer combines both techniques and supports the recovering of file data next to that. PDF documents that are repaired successfully are loaded in a viewer right after the operation completes. If that does not work, PDF Fixer uses data analysis to find data that is recoverable to export that data and make it viewable again.
The process may fail to recover some content, e.g. that is no longer in the file because of corruption, but it may recover content that is still available but not readable in the damaged file.
Closing Words
PDF Fixer is an easy to use program to repair corrupt or damaged PDF documents. It is a handy program to have in a tool arsenal.
Now You: do you use similar tools? Feel free to share them in the comments below.
