I’ve spent an hour now trying to fix some broken PDFs and I must say this is not a joyous experience. The docs have correct file sizes but display as blank pages in Adobe Reader. None of the features in Acrobat 8 Professional seem to help recover the data. There are a couple of free tools that claim to be able to repair PDFs under certain circumstances (not mine though). First was PDFTK, also known as PDF toolkit. This is a command line tool for Windows that does various document processing functions. Another that I’m trying is called jPDFtweak. It is a java based GUI tool that claims to be the “Swiss Army Knife for PDF files”. So far it has crashed on both my Mac and my Vista machine.

Looks like I’ll be recommending a rescanning project!