The PDF workbench; an open-source, modern PDF reader and editor, built in pure Rust.
Read, organize, combine, split and secure PDFs in a fast, native app, written in Rust from the ground up.
macOS · Windows · Linux · FreeBSD · the web

Note

PlutarchPages is a fork of PdfCraft by the ArtCraft team. It adds the fixes and converters listed under Fork changes. It is not an ArtCraft product, and the ArtCraft name and logos have been removed as the upstream brand licence requires for modified versions. Report problems at EquityBot/PlutarchPages. Most of this README describes the upstream app; the program, crates and binaries keep their pdfcraft names.

_{The PlutarchPages Showcase, a 13-page specimen PDF, open with the All tools panel and threaded comments.}

Highlights · Read · Find · Organize · Combine & split · Protect · Forms & layers · Everywhere · Agents · How it's built · Get started · What's next · Downloads

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Community

This fork has no Discord or web page of its own:

• PlutarchPages source and issues: github.com/EquityBot/PlutarchPages
• Upstream PdfCraft: github.com/storytold/pdfcraft

Highlights

Faithful Real-world typography: world scripts, vertical Japanese, colour emoji, gradients, soft masks and transparency. All of it renders the way the author intended.

Fearless Every save appends your changes and leaves the original bytes untouched. Writes are atomic, undo runs deep, and nothing is lost if you close by mistake.

Yours No account, no telemetry, no cloud. It works offline and opens instantly. The engine, CLI and app are all open source.

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Read anything, beautifully

PdfCraft renders PDFs with care for the details that make a page feel right: kerning and ligatures, right-to-left and complex scripts, vertical CJK, colour emoji, shadings, blend modes, soft masks and optional content.

_{Twelve writing systems on one page, plus vertical Japanese, at 125%.}

• Deep zoom stays sharp. Large pages render in tiles, so text stays crisp at any magnification.
• Built to survive bad files. Every page renders in isolation and damaged documents are repaired. Across the 983-file pdf.js test corpus the result is 0 crashes.
• Layouts for every task: continuous, single page, two-up, view rotation, full screen and a distraction-free Read mode.
• Light and dark themes in one colour scheme: ivory chrome or true black for OLED screens, crimson and Tyrian purple accents, gold frames and links. Pages stay white.

Two-up Read mode, ready for long reading	The dark theme, with the comments panel open

Find it, select it, copy it

Search the whole document as you type, step through matches with ⌘G, and select text that comes out in the right reading order. That holds for columns, right-to-left runs and CJK too.

Navigate long documents

Right-click a PDF tab to close it, reopen the last closed file-backed tab, or reveal its file. Closing still asks about unsaved changes. Reopening reads the saved file from disk; it does not restore discarded edits. Reveal selects the file in Explorer or Finder. On Linux and FreeBSD it requests org.freedesktop.FileManager1.ShowItems, falling back to opening the containing directory with xdg-open when that service is unavailable. Reopen and Reveal are unavailable on the web; Reveal is also unavailable for pathless documents.

Bookmarks, page thumbnails and the document's own page labels (i, ii, 1, 2…) keep you oriented in long documents. Search bookmark titles in the Bookmarks panel to find nested entries even when their parents are collapsed. Matches keep their ancestors for context; Clear restores the unfiltered tree without changing its expansion state.

In Inspector > Pages, use Thumbnail size and the smaller/larger buttons to show more pages or inspect larger previews (50–150%). This changes only the thumbnails, keeping multi-page selection and the current page in view. The size belongs to the open document view and survives reloading its file; it is not remembered after restarting. Agents can set it with ui.set {"key":"thumbnail-zoom","value":"75"} and read active.thumbnail_zoom from ui.state.

Find as you type: match 10 of 16	Nested bookmarks with the document's own page labels

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Organize pages like cards on a table

Open Organize pages to see every page at once:

• Select pages: click, ⌘-click or ⇧-click.
• Change them: rotate, delete, insert blank pages, insert pages from another file, and move them earlier or later.
• Undo anything: ⌘Z, then save.

_{Organize pages with three pages selected and the page tools in the toolbar above.}

Undo that goes the distance. Each change is one step in a history you can walk backwards and forwards. The Edit menu names the step ("Undo Rotate pages"), and undo still works after you save. Saves you can trust: Incremental: the original bytes stay byte-for-byte intact. Atomic: the file is written to a temporary copy, then swapped in. Verified: independently checked with qpdf, on every CI run. When open documents exceed the window width, scroll over the tab strip with the mouse wheel or trackpad, or use its horizontal scrollbar. Opening or switching to a document brings its tab into view. Unsaved documents carry a dot on their tab, and closing or quitting asks before anything is lost. Changes are autosaved every minute. If PdfCraft ever quits unexpectedly, it offers to recover your work the next time it opens. Encrypted documents stay encrypted on disk.

Split document: one page per file makes 13 files.

Combine and split without losing a thing

Combine files merges any number of PDFs into one. Each file gets a bookmark, with its own bookmarks nested underneath.

Extract copies the pages you select into a new document. Split divides a document every n pages, or before the pages you choose.

Nothing quietly disappears along the way:

• links and named destinations are rewired to the copied pages;
• form fields stay interactive;
• layers keep their on/off defaults;
• attachments come along.

Every page of a combined document renders pixel-identical to its source.

pdfcraft-cli combine report.pdf appendix.pdf --out combined.pdf
pdfcraft-cli extract report.pdf --pages 1,3,5-8 --out highlights.pdf
pdfcraft-cli split   report.pdf --every 10 --out-dir parts/

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Open protected documents and respect their rules

PdfCraft implements the PDF standard security handler completely:

• every revision, from 40-bit RC4 to AES-256;
• user and owner passwords, including Unicode passwords normalised with SASLprep;
• crypt filters and attachment-only encryption.

Documents restricted by their author show a clear notice, and PdfCraft honours their permissions. Enter the owner password and the restrictions lift. Edits to encrypted documents are saved encrypted, under the same keys.

Document Properties, Description tab

Document Properties shows: the document's title, author, subject and keywords, which you can edit; the fonts it uses and whether each is embedded; PDF version, page size, tags, fields, layers and attachments; the full security picture: encryption method, which password opened it, and each permission.

Comments, forms, layers and attachments

Forms: every field with its current value, field highlighting, and checkboxes, radio buttons, lists and signatures drawn the way their author designed them.	Layers: switch optional content on and off and the page re-renders instantly. Comments appear as threaded conversations, and attachments can be opened or saved.

Every tool, one keystroke away

Press ⌘K to search every tool and command, or browse the All tools catalogue. Tools that are still in development are marked with the milestone that will ship them.

_{The ⌘K command palette}

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Runs everywhere, stays yours

• Native on macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and in the browser through WebAssembly, from the same Rust codebase. Windows builds come for x64, x86 and ARM64 (Windows on ARM, no emulation); every ARM64 change is tested on ARM64 hardware in CI.
• Private by design. Documents never leave your machine. There's no account, no telemetry and no cloud processing.
• Engine first. Parsing, rendering and editing live in reusable library crates. The interface is one swappable layer on top.
• Scriptable. The pdfcraft-cli tool (see Built for agents, too) covers inspecting, rendering, extracting text, editing, combining, extracting pages and splitting. Robustness sweeps run on the same engine as the app.

pdfcraft-cli info  form.pdf                                  # structure as JSON
pdfcraft-cli text  paper.pdf --page 3                        # reading-order text
pdfcraft-cli edit  in.pdf --rotate 1,2:90 --delete 5 --title "Q3" --out out.pdf

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Built for agents, too

Every engine feature is reachable without the GUI, through one table of JSON-Schema-described tools: open, inspect, render pages to PNG, extract and find text, rotate, delete, move and insert pages, edit bookmarks and page labels, add, reply to, restyle and delete comments (highlight a phrase just by naming it), list and fill in form fields, protect with passwords, set metadata, undo and redo, save, combine, extract and split. Three front doors share it:

• pdfcraft-cli run, for one-off calls and JSON scripts:

  pdfcraft-cli tools                                        # every tool and its JSON Schema
  pdfcraft-cli run text_find doc=1 query=invoice            # key=value; values parse as JSON
  pdfcraft-cli run --script review.json                     # e.g. comment_add {"type": "highlight", "find": "total due"}
  pdfcraft-cli run --script steps.json --root ./work        # several steps in one session
  pdfcraft-cli run --script steps.json --report             # one JSON document: per step its number, tool, status, result or error

  With --root, every file the script's steps read or write stays in that directory, including the PNG a step saves with "out" (the script itself is read from wherever you name it).

• An MCP server, for AI agents such as Claude. It is opt-in: PdfCraft never starts it on its own, and it opens no network port. It runs only while an agent launches pdfcraft-cli mcp, talks over stdin/stdout, and stops when the agent disconnects. To enable it, add it to your agent's MCP configuration:

  { "mcpServers": { "pdfcraft": { "command": "pdfcraft-cli", "args": ["mcp", "--root", "/path/to/your/pdfs"] } } }

  --compact shrinks the tool list the agent has to read: tools/list returns about ten core tools plus tool_search and tool_call, which find and run every other tool, so the list costs far fewer tokens. Every tool still works.

  --root confines every file the agent can read or write to one directory. Builds that should not include the server at all can use cargo build -p pdfcraft-cli --no-default-features.

• The Rust API (pdfcraft_automation::Automation::call), for embedding.

Edits stay in memory, undoable, until doc_save. Saving to the same file appends an incremental update, so the original bytes are preserved, and the write is atomic. Unsaved changes are never discarded silently.

Driving the app itself

Start the desktop app with pdfcraft --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json and an agent can see and operate the real interface: the widget tree with labels and positions (from the accessibility tree), clicks, typing, keys, commands, view options and screenshots. This is also off by default. It listens only on loopback, and every connection must present the random token written to that file, which only you can read.

Keep the control file in a folder only you can write, not a shared one such as /tmp: another user could create the file there first and receive your commands. pdfcraft-cli ui refuses a control file that is a symbolic link, and on macOS, Linux and FreeBSD one that another user owns or can read or write. The app doesn't start if it can't write the file.

pdfcraft-cli ui --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json inspect query=rotate      # find widgets
pdfcraft-cli ui --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json click label="Organize pages"
pdfcraft-cli ui --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json key key=K modifiers='["command"]'
pdfcraft-cli ui --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json command id=comment.square   # pick a tool, then draw:
pdfcraft-cli ui --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json drag from='[400,300]' to='[600,420]'
pdfcraft-cli ui --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json screenshot --out window.png
pdfcraft-cli ui --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json resize width=1200 height=800
pdfcraft-cli ui --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json focus label="Read"
pdfcraft-cli ui --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json inspect focused=true
pdfcraft-cli ui --control ~/.pdfcraft-control.json quit

ui.panel opens, closes or sizes a side panel: {"panel":"tools"|"side","open":true|false,"width":320}. tools is the Tools panel and side the panel the rail opens (reopening it shows the one open last). width is clamped to the panel's limits (Tools 240–520, side panel 260–520 points). ui.dock.reset resets the side panels: Tools open on the left, default widths. The control channel accepts these methods directly; ui.command also accepts {"id":"ui.panel","params":{...}}. Saved preferences keep the Tools side, the open panels and their widths. Invalid requests return an error without changing the document or the panels.

resize requests a native inner-window size in logical points (each dimension must be between 320 and 8192); the window manager may constrain it. state reports the observed window.width, window.height and window.pixels_per_point. focus accepts exactly one widget id or unique enabled, focusable label; subsequent key requests traverse or activate the actual widgets. inspect includes focusability and accepts a focused filter. quit takes no parameters: clean documents exit normally, while unsaved edits or typing open the existing Save/Don't save/Cancel prompt and return quitting: false, needs_confirmation: true. It never silently discards work. Window resizing and application quit are native-only.

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How it's built

PdfCraft is a Cargo workspace of focused crates, layered so the core never depends on the UI:

Crate	What it does
pdfcraft-filters	Every PDF stream filter (Flate, LZW, ASCII85, RunLength, predictors), encode and decode, property-tested
pdfcraft-crypt	The standard security handler: RC4, AES-128/256, revisions 2–6, permissions
pdfcraft-cos	The PDF object layer: tolerant parsing, repair, copy-on-write edits, incremental and full writing
pdfcraft-organize	Page operations, combine / extract / split, bookmarks, page labels, document information
pdfcraft-fonts	Font metrics and encodings for generated appearances
pdfcraft-annot	Comments: builders and appearance streams for notes, text markup, shapes, ink and text boxes; replies, status, edits
pdfcraft-forms	Interactive forms: the field model, filling with regenerated appearances, Clear form
pdfcraft-render	Rendering, inspection and text extraction with reading order
pdfcraft-engine	The façade every frontend uses: sessions, edits, undo, saving, the tool catalogue
pdfcraft-automation	Agent control: the headless tool table, pdfcraft-cli run, and the opt-in MCP server
pdfcraft-ui-egui	The desktop and web interface

Quality gates. Every change passes the same automated checks:

• formatting, and Clippy with warnings as errors;
• 200+ unit, property and UI tests;
• crate-layering rules and a WebAssembly build check;
• an asset-licence audit.

On top of those, two corpus sweeps run over real-world files:

• Opening and rendering: of the 983 pdf.js test files, 963 open and render cleanly, with 0 crashes.
• Open, edit and save round trips: 958 succeed.

The output is verified against independent implementations: hayro and qpdf on every CI run, and poppler over the corpus on demand (cargo xtask text-oracle).

PdfCraft is a clean-room implementation. Its behaviour comes from the ISO 32000 specification and black-box observation, never from anyone else's code. Every icon, font and image is openly licensed and listed in ATTRIBUTION.md.

Get started

Building needs Rust 1.95 or later.

git clone https://github.com/EquityBot/PlutarchPages
cd PlutarchPages
cargo xtask models                                # fetch the OCR models Scan & OCR needs (release builds include them)
cargo run --release -p pdfcraft -- some.pdf     # desktop app
cargo xtask demo-pdf                              # build the showcase PDF used in these screenshots
cargo xtask screenshots                           # regenerate every screenshot in this README

The interface language is chosen in Menu → Edit → Preferences… (Command-comma on macOS, Ctrl-comma elsewhere, also with no document open; Auto follows the system language; see docs/localization.md) and saved. Japanese covers commands, dialogs, panels and keyboard shortcuts. Command search accepts the translated label, the English label and the stable command id; filenames, PDF contents, author names, custom action names and error details from the engine or the operating system keep their own text.

Japanese fonts come from craft-fonts, an optional build input that every release includes. To build with them (Japanese interface text, and Japanese text in edited PDFs):

git clone https://github.com/storytold/craft-fonts ../craft-fonts
CRAFT_FONTS_DIR=../craft-fonts cargo run --release -p pdfcraft -- some.pdf

Logs, environment variables and other development notes are in docs/development.md.

What's next

PdfCraft is young and moving fast. The aim is a workbench where you can view, organize, annotate, fill, sign and edit PDFs, for professional and everyday workflows.

Where it stands (October 2026), honestly: PdfCraft is alpha. Most essential offline PDF features exist in some form (57% of the features tracked in docs/target-app-parity.md, 94% of core essentials). For everyday work (viewing, commenting, filling and signing forms, organizing pages) readiness is about 55%; across all professional workflows, about 49%; for someone who only needs the essentials, about 66%. Every everyday workflow can be completed, but converting and sharing is weak: no office-document-to-PDF, and .docx export that loses layout.

• Good today: viewing and search; organizing, combining and splitting; most kinds of comment; filling and authoring forms (with sandboxed JavaScript); passwords, redaction and sanitizing; basic digital signatures; printing; the Accessibility Checker; agent control through the CLI and MCP.
• Still borrowed: pages are drawn by the hayro crate while our own renderer is built.
• Thin or missing: reliable editing of existing text (especially CJK and right-to-left), OCR beyond Latin script, office document import/export, signature tokens and online long-term validation, Preflight and PDF/X/UA, printing from the web build, physical printer fidelity, and full XFA forms.
• Hardening: fuzzing still turns up crashes and hangs on hostile files; each one is fixed with a regression test. Quality has not yet been benchmarked side by side.

Next, in order: office-document-to-PDF and a .docx export that keeps layout, the reported bugs and the Chinese interface font, a fidelity harness against a reference renderer, editing existing content, then professional workflows (OCR, office formats, Preflight, signatures, accessibility tagging) and 1.0 polish.

The summary is in ROADMAP.md; the full assessment by dimension and area is in docs/target-app-parity.md, the ranked gaps in docs/gaps.md, and the milestones in docs/roadmap.md.

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Downloads

Builds are on the latest release. Download the file for your system; <ver> in the file names is the version number.

System	Download
Windows	pdfcraft-<ver>-windows-x64.msi, also x86 and arm64, or a -portable.zip
macOS	pdfcraft-<ver>-macos-universal.dmg
Linux	.AppImage, .deb, .rpm or .tar.gz, for x86_64 and aarch64
Command line only	pdfcraft-cli-<ver>-*, for Linux and macOS

The packages are unsigned, so Windows and macOS may warn about or block them. SHA256SUMS.txt on the release lists a checksum for every file. On Windows, don't install it alongside upstream PdfCraft: the 2 share some registry entries, so that isn't supported. Flatpak, Arch, FreeBSD, riscv64 and web packages aren't built yet. To build from source instead, see Development.

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Fork changes

Changes in PlutarchPages, on top of upstream PdfCraft. The feature list follows PDF-XChange Pro's published components (names and descriptions only; nothing from its program code), implemented from public specifications like the rest of PdfCraft.

• Name and brand. The app is called PlutarchPages wherever it shows its name. Settings folders, binaries, crates and the markers it writes into PDFs keep their upstream pdfcraft names, so upstream changes still merge. The ArtCraft name, wordmark and logos are removed (upstream brand licence).
• Security fixes from kopitiam-io/pdfkopi for upstream issues #603 (Document Open password), #568 (copy permission) and #389 (redacted images left in the file), tightened after review: an explicit empty password never skips the prompt or lifts restrictions, the CLI refuses encrypted files whose permissions it can't check, and every document view takes its copy permission from the engine. Redaction clears an image's marked pixels in one copy that every marked draw of it uses, applies a shared form's marks to each marked draw of it, drops the unredacted originals of images, forms and content streams, and refuses (changing nothing) when content under the marks is also used where the marks don't reach, naming the pages to mark as well.
• Create from CSV, Markdown and email (PDF-XChange's CSV, Markdown and EML converters): open or combine .csv/.tsv (a table with a repeated header row), .md and .eml files, or use doc_create. Email attachments are listed, and embedded only when asked. Text is set in the standard PDF fonts; characters they can't show are reported.
• External converters, off by default (Preferences ▸ External converters, or PDFCRAFT_EXTERNAL_CONVERTERS=1): Office files through an installed LibreOffice 26.2.5 or later, HTML files and web pages (Create PDF from web page) through an installed Chrome or Edge. Each run uses a fresh private profile and folder, a deadline and a best-effort process-tree kill; local HTML opens with scripts off and the browser set to refuse network requests. Web addresses that name this computer or a private network are refused, but a page can still redirect to or load from them. They are not sandboxed: convert only files and pages you trust.
• Read Out Loud (View menu, speech_start): the current page or the rest of the document through Windows speech, macOS say or eSpeak NG, with the text sent only on standard input.
• Bookmarks (PDF-XChange's Bookmarks plug-in): colour, bold and italic from the bookmark menu or bookmark_set_style, and the bookmark for the current page is shaded in the panel.
• PDF Optimizer: discard form submit, import and reset actions, discard external cross-references, and remove PDF/A and PDF/X identification.
• Convert colours to grayscale (PDF-XChange's Color Converter; Edit menu, doc_convert_gray).
• Export to Excel (PDF-XChange's Convert to MS Office; File menu, doc_export_office with an .xlsx path): one worksheet per page, detected tables as rows and columns, plain numbers as numbers.

Not implemented, and why: cloud storage connectors (Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint need registered OAuth apps), FileOpen and Azure RMS DRM (proprietary vendor SDKs), the virtual printer driver, legacy browser plug-ins, the Office add-in, the licence key installer, spell checking (no permissively licensed dictionary or checker, and Windows' own checker needs unsafe code), and, for now, 3D content, export to PowerPoint, enhanced OCR clean-up, an AI assistant and an Explorer "Combine" menu.

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License and credits

PdfCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. Copyright (c) 2026 ArtCraft Team and the PdfCraft contributors. Required notices are in NOTICE.

Bundled fonts, icons, images and other assets keep their own open licenses; each one is listed with its author, source and license in ATTRIBUTION.md. Release builds also embed the Japanese fonts of craft-fonts (SIL Open Font License 1.1).

PdfCraft is made by the ArtCraft team and community. The ArtCraft name, wordmark and logos are trademarks of the ArtCraft Team; this fork has removed them, as the upstream brand licence requires for modified versions, and is not an ArtCraft product.

The banner's lettering and emblem are drawn from Cascadia Mono glyphs (SIL OFL 1.1).

_{Adobe, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Acrobat, After Effects and InDesign are trademarks or registered trademarks of Adobe Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. PdfCraft is an independent, open-source project and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Adobe Inc.; these names are used only to describe the workflows it is compatible with.}

The Tools panel sits on the left, or on the right with Preferences ▸ Tools panel side. The rail stays at the right edge and opens one side panel beside it. Drag a panel's inner edge to resize it; widths are remembered. F4 shows or hides the side panel and Shift+F4 the Tools panel (also in the View menu); View ▸ Reset side panels restores the default arrangement.