PaperPilot - Zero-Cloud, Pure-Rust PDF Engine with WASM and MCP

PDF tools for your AI agent - and for you. Pure Rust. Runs locally. Files never leave your machine.

Try it in your browser → · Download · Roadmap

PaperPilot is a PDF and document toolkit written in Rust. The same engine runs as:

No Chromium, no C++ runtime, no cloud calls.

MCP Server

Download paperpilot-mcp from Releases, then add it to claude_desktop_config.json:

{ "mcpServers": { "paperpilot": { "command": "/path/to/paperpilot-mcp" } } }

Restart Claude and try: "Merge these two PDFs and compress the result."

CLI

# Merge
paperpilot merge --inputs doc1.pdf doc2.pdf --output merged.pdf
# Compress
paperpilot compress --input in.pdf --quality 75 --output compressed.pdf
# Rotate pages 1, 3-5 by 90°
paperpilot rotate --input in.pdf --pages 1,3-5 --angle 90 --output out.pdf

Browser

Go to usepaperpilot.com. Open your browser's Network tab while you work - you'll see no file uploads.

Build From Source

git clone https://github.com/KrushnaVardhanReddy/PaperPilot.git
cd PaperPilot
cargo build --release -p paperpilot-cli -p paperpilot-mcp -p paperpilot-gateway

Desktop app:

cd apps/desktop && pnpm install && pnpm tauri dev

Requires Rust 1.75+, Node.js, and pnpm.

Features

Organize: merge, split, rotate, delete pages, reorder pages, extract pages, booklet imposition, N-up grid

Optimize: compress

Extract: plain text, OCR (pure-Rust PaddleOCR via rten)

Security: watermark, validate signatures, remove signatures, PII scan, deep sanitize

Office data: Excel → JSON, Excel → CSV

Coming next (see ROADMAP.md):

• v0.7: PDF ↔ Markdown / HTML / JSON
• v0.8: PDF → Word / Excel / PowerPoint
• v0.9: encrypt, decrypt, sign, redact, forms, annotations
• v1.0: render, flatten, repair, compare, PDF/A, Bates numbering

Why PaperPilot

• Private by default. Everything runs locally or in your browser tab.
• Agent-ready. MCP support is first-class, not an afterthought.
• One engine, many surfaces. CLI, MCP, REST, WASM, and desktop share the same Rust core, so behavior is consistent.
• Small and dependency-light. Pure Rust, built on lopdf, pdf_oxide, rten, and friends.

Run cargo bench --workspace to reproduce. Methodology and results: SYSTEM_BENCHMARK_REPORT.md.

Architecture

Desktop (Tauri) · CLI · REST (Axum) · MCP (stdio) · WASM (browser / edge)

│ Rust core workspace paperpilot-core · paperpilot-pdf · paperpilot-nlp · paperpilot-gateway paperpilot-mcp · paperpilot-wasm · paperpilot-storage

paperpilot serve --port 7823
curl -X POST http://localhost:7823/api/v1/pdf/merge \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"inputs": ["a.pdf", "b.pdf"], "output": "out.pdf"}'

Swagger docs at http://localhost:7823/docs.

Contributing and License

Issues and PRs are welcome. Good first contributions: bug reports with a sample PDF, new tool requests, and docs fixes.

Community Edition (this repo): Apache 2.0. It includes the CLI, MCP server, REST gateway, WASM engine, and desktop app. An Enterprise Edition (SSO, RBAC, audit logs, DLP) is developed separately.