PDF Repair

Diagnose & repair damaged PDFs (pdf-repair)

Diagnose & repair damaged PDFs

Part of the Universal PDF Management & Creation Skill Repository. Category: PDF Management. Every skill is individually callable (INDIVIDUAL MODE) and may also be invoked automatically by the orchestrator (SYSTEM MODE).

When to use

Recover usable content from a malformed/corrupt PDF and say what failed.

Operations

• openability probe
• page-tree health
• renderability
• rebuild xrefs
• per-page rescue
• report unrecovered content

Engine (what actually executes this)

universal_pdf/core.repair:diagnose / repair_pdf

All heavy lifting is done on disk / one page at a time by the shared engine — never by loading the document into an LLM context.

Tools & graceful degradation

• Preferred tool: PyMuPDF re-save (garbage)
• Fallback: pypdf structural rebuild

If the preferred backend is unavailable the skill transparently uses the fallback or reports a documented limitation. It never reports success when an operation did not actually happen.

Validation (this skill attaches checks to its Outcome)

openable after repair; recovered page count reported

Related skills

pdf-validation, pdf-compress, pdf-orchestrate

Example requests it handles

• "This PDF won't open - repair it."

Notes

Provenance: outputs cite their source page/section where relevant.