1 answer sorted by: 2 when pdf has multiple xref tables, it has been incrementally updated. trailer the xref table a cross- reference table ( xref) is a table of the indirect objects in the body. it looks like this: xreffnnnn let’ s go through it step- by- step:. 4kyou mention iso 3. the type you' re talking about are pdf xref table can be simple to fix, but it would be a mistake to intentionally distribute documents that you know are damaged. a pdf’ s xref table is a list of all objects defined in the file. it allows quick access to those objects by pointing to their location in the file. in contrast to some details of pdfs, the specification of cross reference tables therein is pretty straight forward and easy to understand. how about simply creating the cross reference table as described there? what are pdf xref tables? among other benefits this ( incremental update) allows to have kind of versioning feature - one can extract the version of the document before it was updated. xref tables are part of the original pdf file specification and one of the features which gives the pdf file format its flexibility. this table may easily contain many thousands of entries – the manual adobe pdf references for example has 127, 000 objects. it is found in the trailer. 1 correct answer george_ johnson • legend, yes, reader/ acrobat are able to detect and repair some types of errors. a pdf file can contain multiple linked xref tables which all need to be read. the following script loops through the xref table and prints each object’ s definition:.