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PdfCraft lets your AI agent open and edit PDFs
PdfCraft is a free, open source PDF application from the ArtCraft team, written in pure Rust, and it ships with an agent tool table, so a coding agent can search, fill, combine or redact your PDFs while the files stay on your own machine.
PdfCraft is an open source PDF application built by the ArtCraft team entirely in Rust, and the authors themselves describe it as a PDF workbench, a clean room reimplementation of Adobe Acrobat built without copying anyone else's code. It runs natively on macOS, with a separate build for Apple Silicon, and also on Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and in the browser through WebAssembly, and it does not send the document anywhere, because there is no account, no telemetry and no cloud step. Regarding the agent side, PdfCraft ships an MCP server that stays off by default and opens no network port until an agent starts it, and once it is running, an agent gets the same tool table a person has in the interface: searching and extracting text, rotating and reordering pages, replying to comments, filling form fields, protecting files with a password, combining and splitting documents, and undoing or saving the result. On the pdf.js test corpus of 983 files, 963 open and render without a single crash, and 958 of those same files still work correctly after an edit and a save, so in my experience that is a reasonable sign that an ordinary contract or scanned form will survive being handled this way. At the moment the authors say plainly that PdfCraft covers about half of Acrobat Pro's offline features, which is 88 percent of what people actually need day to day, and that reliable editing of text already in the document, recognition of non Latin scripts, and import from office formats are still thin or missing.
Why a vibe-coder should care
For routine document chores, finding a clause, filling out a form, combining several files into one, this is exactly the kind of task I would hand to an agent without supervising it, because the result is a finished file rather than a list of steps for a person to do by hand. I would use it for the paperwork that repeats every week, and I would not yet rely on it for careful editing of text inside a complex layout, because the authors admit that part is still weak. It is free, it needs no subscription and no server setup, and no API keys are required for this, which for a one-off document task is a real advantage.
How to install
Copy this and send it to your agent — Claude Code, Codex, any of them:
Set up PdfCraft from this repo: https://github.com/storytold/pdfcraft — install the app or build pdfcraft-cli per the README, turn on its MCP server pointed at a folder with a few of my own PDF files, and show me the agent finding a piece of text in one of them and listing its form fields.
This is light software: no GPU needed, it installs as a single app on an ordinary laptop, and it runs fully offline.
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