PdfCraft is an open-source Adobe Acrobat alternative in Rust with MCP support

A free app that opens 963 of 983 real PDF test files cleanly and crashes on none of them is now the alternative that most teams on an Adobe Acrobat subscription did not have last month. PdfCraft, the newest release from the ArtCraft open-source team, is a Rust PDF reader and editor that the project pitches as a clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Acrobat, with an opt-in MCP server for coding agents and a command-line tool for scripts. The GitHub repository was created on 30 September 2026 and had 14,885 stars by 16 October.

PdfCraft is the eighth app in ArtCraft's lineup, which replaces separate parts of Adobe Creative Cloud with free, open-source apps written natively in Rust. The source is on GitHub under Apache-2.0 or MIT, and the ArtCraft organisation on GitHub has 53,026 followers and 65 public repositories dating from January 2021. The project marks itself as alpha for October 2026.

What the project claims about coverage

The README quantifies the comparison with Adobe Acrobat in six numbers, all stated by the project. It says PdfCraft covers "about 57% of all tracked features" and "94% of the must-haves", and that it is "about 55% of the way to replacing Acrobat" for everyday work. Against the full Acrobat Pro feature set it reports 49%, and for an essentials-only user, 66%. The project also publishes test results: 963 of 983 pdf.js test files open cleanly with zero crashes, and 958 open-edit-save round trips succeed. Treat the coverage percentages as the project's own weighting, since there is no agreed catalogue of Acrobat features to measure against.

What it does differently

Two choices in the design are worth naming. The first is that every save appends a change and leaves the original bytes untouched, so a document being edited by two people can be reconciled rather than overwritten. The second is that each page is rendered in isolation, and damaged documents are repaired at open time rather than refused. The project lists colour emoji, vertical Japanese, right-to-left scripts, kerning and ligatures as rendering features, and reports that large pages render in tiles so text stays sharp at magnification. Selection returns text in the correct reading order.

The MCP server and the CLI

PdfCraft ships a command-line tool called pdfcraft-cli that covers opening, inspecting, rendering a page to PNG, extracting text, rotating, deleting and inserting pages, bookmarks, comments, filling forms, password protection and splitting a document. The MCP server is opt-in, runs only while an agent launches pdfcraft-cli mcp, and offers 10 core tools plus tool_search and tool_call. A --root flag confines the agent's file access to one directory, which is the sort of safety primitive that lets a team script a PDF workflow without handing an agent its whole filesystem.

The practical shape is this. A team that currently pays Adobe for annotation, form filling and redaction on a few thousand documents a month can now ask an agent to do that work locally, under a licence that does not prohibit automation. For a developer, the MCP interface is the shortest path between a Claude or Codex session and a batch of PDFs sitting in a folder. For a team that only needs reliable viewing, extraction and page editing, the alpha label will matter less than it does for a legal team working with redactions. The project is sixteen days old, so a cautious buyer still wants to run their own file through PdfCraft and the Acrobat they already own before any switch.

Source

storytold/pdfcraft on GitHub, Apache-2.0 and MIT dual-licensed. The parent project is ArtCraft Crafting Apps.