PDF FIles Corrupted

[StevenMiller]

This was a PDF file that I created with an Epson Scanner. Adobe Reader set as the default program to open it. All was fine. Now  I try to open up a PDF file and get
Can’t open the file there is a problem with the File Format
Makes no sense.  Does anyone know of a good  PDF recovery tool? Free or not.
Thank You!

[Shades]

The scan software you used to create the PDF file with...do you know which version of the PDF format it creates?

If it is an older PDF format, you might be in luck finding (open source) software to repair or recover your data from. Maybe a copy of Libre Office or Open Office (both open source) is able to read the "mangled" file(s).

Newer PDF formats have much more "trickery" build into them. Even if those new features aren't used in your generated PDF, it is highly likely that repair is much more difficult and possibly costly to recover/repair.

If repair isn't a possibility, would it be too difficult/Time-consuming for you to regenerate these PDF files (perhaps using an older/simpler version of the PDF format while you are at it)?

[ewemoa]

I've had pretty good results using the command line tool mutool (using the "clean" subcommand) that comes with mupdf.  I haven't tried on Windows, but may be mutool comes in one of the files at the following:

  http://mupdf.com/downloads/

mutool clean [options] input.pdf [output.pdf] [pages]

The clean command pretty prints and rewrites the syntax of a PDF file. It can be used to repair broken files, expand compressed streams, filter out a range of pages, etc.

If no output file is specified, it will write the cleaned PDF to "out.pdf" in the current directory.

via:

  https://www.mankier.com/1/mutool#Clean