pdfops

Fast PDF operations for AI agents. A single Rust binary with no native PDF libraries to install, JSON in and out.

• CLI: every command prints a single JSON document.
• MCP server: pdfops mcp exposes every command as a tool over stdio.
• Function calling: pdfops tools prints tool definitions with JSON Schemas.
• Library: the same commands as Rust functions.

Install

Download a prebuilt binary from the latest release and put pdfops on your PATH. Archives are named by platform:

Or build from source with Rust 1.92 or newer:

cargo install --git https://github.com/KayZedd/pdfops

OCR additionally needs the tesseract program; nothing else does. Language data is fetched on request, without administrator rights:

pdfops ocr-langs                     # is tesseract there, which languages can be used
pdfops ocr-install --lang pol+eng    # download language data into the user's data directory
pdfops ocr-install --engine          # install tesseract itself where that needs no password

Commands

Run pdfops <command> --help for the options of each.

Usage

$ pdfops info manual.pdf
{"encrypted":false,"file":"manual.pdf","form_fields":0,
 "metadata":{"created":"2026-06-30T09:07:46+00:00","producer":"GPL Ghostscript 10.07.1"},
 "outline_entries":645,"page_size_pt":{"height":792.0,"width":595.0},"pages":357,"pdf_version":"1.3",
 "size_bytes":1386723,"uniform_page_size":true}

$ pdfops search manual.pdf "calling convention" --max-results 1 --context 40
{"file":"manual.pdf","matches":[{"match":"Calling Convention","page":12,
 "snippet":"... 10.5.1 The Pascal Calling Convention ..."}],"query":"calling convention",
 "total_matches":17,"unreadable_pages":[]}

$ pdfops text manual.pdf --pages 12- --max-chars 4000     # resume_at_page says where to continue
$ pdfops text scan.pdf --ocr --ocr-lang pol+eng           # OCR only the pages that have no text
$ pdfops render report.pdf --pages 1-3 --dpi 150 -o out/  # look at charts and layout
$ pdfops images report.pdf -o images/
$ pdfops pages in.pdf --keep "3,1,5-" -o out.pdf
$ pdfops split in.pdf --every 10 -o parts/
$ pdfops merge a.pdf b.pdf -o merged.pdf
$ pdfops tables report.pdf --pages 4 --format markdown
$ pdfops layout report.pdf --pages 4 --level words         # bbox, font and size per word
$ pdfops stamp in.pdf --text "Poufne · {page}/{pages}" --position footer -o out.pdf
$ pdfops stamp in.pdf --image signature.png --x 380 --y 690 --width 140 --pages last -o out.pdf
$ pdfops stamp in.pdf --qr "https://example.com/doc/42" --anchor bottom-right -o out.pdf
$ pdfops redact in.pdf --text "Jan Kowalski" --text "\d{11}" --regex -o redacted.pdf
$ pdfops redact in.pdf --rect "2:100,200,300,220" -o redacted.pdf
$ pdfops replace in.pdf --find "2025" --with "2026" -o out.pdf
$ pdfops create notes.md -o notes.pdf
$ pdfops compress in.pdf --max-image-edge 1600 --image-quality 70 -o small.pdf
$ pdfops forms form.pdf
$ pdfops fill form.pdf --set name="Ada Lovelace" --set agree=true -o filled.pdf
$ pdfops encrypt in.pdf --owner-password secret --deny-copy -o locked.pdf

Positions are in points with the origin at the top-left corner of the page as displayed, y growing downwards. layout reports them, stamp --x/--y and redact --rect accept them, and a pixel of render --dpi 72 is exactly one point.

Page specs are 1-based and comma separated: 3, 2-5, 7- (to the end), -4 (from the start), 5-2 (descending), last, odd, even, all.

Commands that write a file take -o; it may be the input file, since output goes through a temporary file. Errors are printed to stderr as {"error": "..."} with exit status 1. Add --pretty to indent the JSON.

MCP server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdfops": { "command": "pdfops", "args": ["mcp"] }
  }
}

For Claude Code: claude mcp add pdfops -- pdfops mcp.

Tools are named pdf_info, pdf_text, pdf_set_meta and so on, and take the same arguments as the CLI. Relative paths resolve against the server's working directory.

Function calling without MCP

pdfops tools prints [{"name", "description", "inputSchema"}] for every command. Pass these to any function calling API, then run the call through the CLI or the library.

Library

let result = pdfops::tools::call(
    "pdf_text",
    serde_json::json!({"input": "report.pdf", "pages": "1-3"}),
)?;

Typed entry points live in pdfops::ops, for example pdfops::ops::read::text(TextArgs { .. }).

Performance

Best of 5 runs on a 357 page, 1.4 MB manual, 4 core Intel i5-4460, against poppler 26 and qpdf 12:

info, render, images and ocr read objects on demand, so opening a file costs a few milliseconds whatever its size. Text extraction, rendering, splitting, image export and OCR run on all cores. Page operations copy only the objects the selected pages reach, so output size and time follow the selection, not the source.

Behaviour worth knowing

• Text outside Latin-1. stamp, fill, replace and create embed a subset of a font that has the glyphs: the one given with stamp --font, otherwise one found on the system. Latin-1 text uses the built-in Helvetica and embeds nothing. Text is placed glyph by glyph: scripts that need shaping or right-to-left layout (Arabic, Hebrew, Indic) will not come out right.
• Redaction deletes what is under the areas from the page content: glyphs, image pixels (including scanned pages), drawings lying wholly inside an area, and annotations with the form values they show. Text around it does not move. The result is read back by a second, independent interpreter, and nothing is written unless every area is empty. When a page is built in a way that cannot be rewritten with certainty (inline images, JPEG 2000 or CMYK JPEG under an area), the command fails instead of guessing. It does not rewrite document metadata, bookmarks or attached files, and it removes the accessibility structure tree, which can repeat page text.
• Replace writes the new text with the codes the document's own font already uses for those characters on that page, so style is kept exactly. If the font (usually a subset) lacks a needed glyph, another font writes just those words, at the same size, position and colour, and the result says so. Lines are not re-flowed: a longer replacement runs into what follows, and overflow_pt reports by how much. Text inside form fields and annotations is not edited.
• Tables drawn with ruling lines are read cell by cell and are reliable. Tables without lines are inferred from column alignment (detected_by: alignment) and deserve a look before trusting.
• Create understands headings, emphasis, links, nested lists, quotes, code blocks, tables, rules and local images. HTML inside the Markdown is ignored; there is no HTML or CSS engine.
• Bookmarks. merge, pages and split keep the bookmarks whose target page is in the output. They land at the top of that page. Named destinations used by links are not carried over.
• Forms when merging. Fields of the second and later inputs are renamed doc2.<name>, doc3.<name>, so equal names do not share a value.
• Lossy compression is opt-in through --image-quality and --max-image-edge. It re-encodes 8-bit grey and RGB images as JPEG. Masks, palette images, CMYK and 1-bit scans are left untouched, and the output is never larger than the input.
• Images are the ones a page actually draws, including inline images and images inside forms. JPEG and JPEG 2000 are written as stored; everything else (Flate, LZW, CCITT fax, JBIG2, palette, masks) is decoded to PNG.
• OCR quality and languages are tesseract's. Recognised text is returned, not written into the PDF. When a language is missing, the error names the ocr-install call that fixes it, so an agent can recover on its own. Data comes from the tessdata_fast repository (--best for the larger models) and is kept in ~/.local/share/pdfops/tessdata, or PDFOPS_TESSDATA if set. Installing tesseract itself uses the system package manager; where that needs a password, the command to run is returned instead.
• Signatures. Any change to a signed PDF invalidates its digital signatures.

Development

cargo test                                # under a second; fixtures are generated in memory
cargo test -- --ignored                   # OCR test, needs tesseract with a language pack
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --check

Built on lopdf (object model), pdf-extract (text), hayro (rendering, positions and image decoding), subsetter (font embedding) and pulldown-cmark (Markdown).

License

MIT