How to Repair Corrupted PDFs in the Browser with Vue 3 and pdf-lib

A corrupted PDF is one of the most frustrating file problems. You have important content inside, but the document won't open, opens with garbled text, or shows missing pages. The file might be damaged from a bad download, a converter error, or a storage glitch. Recovering content from a broken PDF doesn't require complex forensic tools. Often, the individual pages are still readable — it's the document's structure (cross-reference tables, object streams) that's damaged. By extracting pages one by one into a fresh PDF, we can bypass the structural corruption. Here's how to build a browser-based PDF repair tool with Vue 3 and pdf-lib . The repair strategy The core insight: PDF structure and page content are somewhat independent . A PDF can have a broken cross-reference table or missing trailer objects, but the actual page content streams may still be perfectly readable. The repair approach: Load the damaged PDF and attempt to read each page For each successfully read page, copy it to a new PDF document Discard unreadable pages (they're lost anyway) Save the new document This is fundamentally different from "fixing" the original PDF. We're extracting what we can and rebuilding from the ground up. The stack Vue 3 with Composition API pdf-lib for PDF reading and page extraction Vite for bundling The core implementation < script setup lang= "ts" > import { ref } from ' vue ' import { PDFDocument } from ' pdf-lib ' const file = ref < File | null > ( null ) const totalPages = ref ( 0 ) const recoveredPages = ref ( 0 ) const repairing = ref ( false ) const result = ref < Uint8Array | null > ( null ) const error = ref < string | null > ( null ) async function repairPdf () { if ( ! file . value ) return repairing . value = true error . value = null try { const arrayBuffer = await file . value . arrayBuffer () const damaged = await PDFDocument . load ( arrayBuffer , { ignoreEncryption : true , updateMetadata : false , }) totalPages . value = damaged . getPageCount () const resu