Repairing a Broken PDF in Rust — Rebuilding the XREF Table From Scratch

All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. Some PDFs won't open. Not because the content is gone — because the index that tells readers where to find the content is corrupt. That index is the XREF table. And it can be rebuilt. What the XREF table is Every PDF has a cross-reference table near the end of the file. It's a lookup map: object ID → byte offset in the file. xref 0 6 0000000000 65535 f 0000000009 00000 n 0000000058 00000 n 0000000115 00000 n 0000000266 00000 n 0000000496 00000 n When a