PDFs are everywhere — yet many of them are broken
PDFs are everywhere.
Yet almost everyone has dealt with PDFs that are frustratingly broken.
For example:
scanned PDFs that can’t be searched or copied
documents where text is misaligned or unreadable
files that look fine visually but are useless digitally
Students, developers, accountants, and legal professionals run into these issues regularly.
Despite this, most PDF tools still focus on conversion, not repair.
Conversion is not the same as repair
Many popular PDF tools offer:
PDF to Word
PDF to Excel
PDF to Image
But when a PDF is:
scanned
skewed
poorly structured
missing text layers
conversion doesn’t actually fix the underlying problem.
What’s missing is repair:
restoring readable text
fixing alignment
improving structure
keeping the document usable as a PDF
This gap keeps appearing in real workflows.
The question I’m exploring
Instead of building another all-in-one PDF suite, I’m curious about a much smaller idea:
What would a tool look like if it focused only on repairing broken PDFs?
Not converting formats.
Not exporting files.
Just fixing PDFs so they can be read, searched, and used again.
Why I’m writing this before building anything
Before writing code, I want to understand how others experience this problem.
Some questions I’m curious about:
What kind of PDFs break most often in your work?
Are they scanned notes, invoices, contracts, or something else?
When you think of “PDF repair”, what does that mean to you?
Real answers here matter more than assumptions.
If this sounds familiar
If you’ve dealt with unreadable or broken PDFs, I’d love to hear:
what failed for you
what tools you tried
what you wish existed instead
I’m exploring this problem in the open and learning from real use cases.
Final note
This is not a product launch.
It’s a conversation.
Thanks for reading — and feel free to share your experience in the comments.
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