pdfplumber/docs/repairing.md

Repairing Malformed PDFs

Many parsing issues can be traced back to malformed PDFs.

Malformed PDFs can often be fixed via Ghostscript.

pdfplumber lets you automatically run those repairs, in several ways:

• pdfplumber.open(..., repair=True) will repair your PDF on the fly (but not save the repaired version to disk).
• pdfplumber.repair(path_to_pdf) will return a BytesIO object holding the bytes of a repaired version of the original file.
• pdfplumber.repair(path_to_pdf, outfile="path/to/repaired.pdf") will write a repaired version of the original file to the indicated outfile path.

Custom parameters

• gs_path=...: You can pass a custom path for the Ghostscript executable, helpful in case pdfplumber is unable to auto-detect your copy of Ghostscript.