PaperPilot

Overview

PaperPilot is a PDF and document toolkit written in Rust. The same engine runs as an MCP server for coding agents, a CLI for batch workflows, a browser/WASM tool, a Tauri desktop app, and a local REST API. It supports operations such as merging, splitting, OCR, compression, page layout, extraction, and security analysis. Its stated design goal is local processing: files are processed on the machine or in the browser rather than uploaded to a cloud service.

Key Features

• One Rust core shared across MCP server, CLI, browser/WASM, desktop app, and local REST API surfaces.
• PDF organization and layout: merge, split, rotate, delete, reorder, extract pages, booklet imposition, N-up grids, and poster tiling.
• Optimization and extraction: lossy compression, stream deduplication, structured text, detected Markdown tables, and pure-Rust OCR.
• Security and analysis tools: watermarking, signature validation and removal, PII scanning, deep sanitize, and malformed-input fuzzing.
• Office data conversion: Excel to JSON and Excel to CSV.
• MCP-compatible local stdio server for clients such as Codex, Claude Code, Kimi Code, Pi, Claude Desktop, and Cursor.

Use Cases

• Give coding agents and MCP clients local PDF merge, split, OCR, and compression tools.
• Run batch or scripted document workflows through the CLI.
• Use zero-install browser tools for local PDF operations without uploading files.
• Call document operations from Python, Node, or n8n through the local REST API.

Getting Started

• Download paperpilot-mcp from Releases, add it to claude_desktop_config.json under mcpServers.paperpilot.command, restart Claude, then try a prompt such as 'Merge these two PDFs and compress the result.'
• Build from source with cargo build --release -p paperpilot-cli -p paperpilot-mcp -p paperpilot-gateway.
• For the desktop app, run pnpm install and pnpm tauri dev in apps/desktop.
• Use CLI commands such as paperpilot merge --inputs doc1.pdf doc2.pdf --output merged.pdf.

Deployment & Requirements

• Rust 1.75 or newer is required for source builds.
• Node.js and pnpm are required for the desktop app.
• The project states no Chromium, C++ runtime, or cloud calls are required.

Before You Adopt

• License: Other. Review its terms before using, modifying, or distributing the project.
• The current documented feature set is v0.6, which signals an early-stage release.
• The project emphasizes privacy by keeping document processing local to the user's machine.
• Building the desktop app adds Node.js and pnpm as external toolchain dependencies.