Okular has completely corrupted my PDF. I was adding annotations to it and it crashed, and now no PDF viewer can open it. Okular doesn't open at all.

I've been Okular for a while but this is shocking, I've lost some very important notes and I'm not sure what to do. I've tried repair tools including gs, but no avail. Here is the file: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

OS is Linux Mint.

Thanks!

The file is empty. There's nothing in it.

Thank you for your reply! The PDF file is not empty, it is corrupted, which is why you can not open it. It is 3.2 MB, and if you open the PDF in a text editor, you can clearly see that there are remnants of a PDF file. My guess is that while annotating, Okular screwed up something in the PDF metadata that is preventing it from opening it.

I can open it ( libreoffice, evince..) but there's nothing in it ( at least, not visible). It's quite possible it's corrupted but I find it hard to believe that it's due to okular itself.
Anywho, if you open it in a terminal ( pdftotext) you get the errors in the file:
Syntax Error: Couldn't find trailer dictionary
Syntax Error: Invalid XRef entry 369
Syntax Error: Invalid XRef entry 362
Syntax Error: Top-level pages object is wrong type (null)
Command Line Error: Wrong page range given: the first page (1) can not be after the last page (0)

I tried to repair it with ghostscript (pdftocairo -pdf chapter5a.pdf print_repaired.pdf) , but it remains empty and spawns the same errors.

This command too shows errors:
gs \
-o repaired.pdf \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress \
chapter5a.pdf
GPL Ghostscript 9.55.0 (2021-09-27)
Copyright (C) 2021 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
This software is supplied under the GNU AGPLv3 and comes with NO WARRANTY:
see the file COPYING for details.
**** Error: An error occurred while reading an XREF table.
**** The file has been damaged. This may have been caused
**** by a problem while converting or transferring the file.
**** Ghostscript will attempt to recover the data.
**** However, the output may be incorrect.
**** Error: Trailer dictionary not found.
Output may be incorrect.
No pages will be processed (FirstPage > LastPage).

**** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.
**** Please notify the author of the software that produced this
**** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF
**** specification.

**** The rendered output from this file may be incorrect.