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Import & file problems

A PDF won’t import or shows as corrupted

Section titled “A PDF won’t import or shows as corrupted”

Orifold attempts a qpdf recovery pass automatically for damaged PDFs. If recovery still fails, the file’s internal structure may be too badly damaged to repair — try opening it in another app first to see if it opens at all.

A single workspace holds up to 50 files. Export what you have as one PDF, then start a second workspace for the remaining files, and combine the two exports if needed.

An imported file doesn’t show any content

Section titled “An imported file doesn’t show any content”

Confirm the format is supported: PDF, Word and OpenDocument text, HTML, Markdown, plain text and source files, CSV, JSON, XML, spreadsheets, presentations, EPUB, SVG, common images, and CBZ comic-book archives. Other formats aren’t recognized yet.

A CBZ must be a readable ZIP-compatible archive containing supported image files. Orifold ignores folders, text files, and macOS metadata; it reports a specific error if no image pages remain. Archives over 100 MB, individual expanded entries over 25 MB, or comics over 1,000 image pages are refused rather than partially converted.

Double-check you’re entering the PDF’s actual open password, not a permissions/owner password — some PDFs use different passwords for opening versus editing permissions.

Very large scanned PDFs (hundreds of high-resolution pages) can take longer to render and OCR. This is expected — everything is processing locally, with no cloud offload to speed it up.

Open an issue on GitHub.