PdfCraft · Alternative to Acrobat
PdfCraft: Free, Open-Source Acrobat Alternative
PdfCraft is an open-source, clean-room PDF workbench in pure Rust for reading, organizing, combining, splitting and securing PDFs, modelled on Acrobat.
- Early alpha
- v0.6.0 · October 11, 2026
- GitHub ★ 8.9k
- MIT / Apache-2.0
What PdfCraft does
Faithful rendering
Kerning, ligatures, right-to-left and complex scripts, vertical CJK, colour emoji, soft masks and transparency; 0 crashes across the 983-file pdf.js corpus.
Organize pages
See every page at once to rotate, delete, insert blank or imported pages and reorder them, with named, deep undo that survives saving.
Combine and split cleanly
Combine, extract and split keep links, form fields, layers and attachments intact, and combined pages render pixel-identical to their source.
Safe saves
Saves are incremental and atomic, leaving the original bytes untouched; output is checked with qpdf, and work autosaves every minute.
Full PDF security handler
Every standard security revision from 40-bit RC4 to AES-256, user and owner passwords, and honoured document permissions.
Comments, forms and signatures
Most comment types, filling and authoring forms with sandboxed JavaScript, redaction, basic digital signatures and the Accessibility Checker work today.
File formats
- PDF (read/write)
- PNG (page render via CLI/MCP)
How mature is it?
Alpha (October 2026): 57% of all tracked Acrobat Pro features and 94% of must-haves exist; about 55% of the way for everyday work and 49% against all of Acrobat Pro.
Biggest gaps
- Reliable editing of existing text, especially CJK and right-to-left.
- Converting and sharing: no Office-to-PDF, Word export loses layout, and OCR is limited to Latin script.
- Some password-protected files that Acrobat opens, printing on Windows, Preflight and PDF/X/UA, and full XFA forms.
- Pages are still drawn by the hayro crate while its own renderer is built, and fuzzing still finds crashes on hostile files.
Automation and AI agents
One table of JSON-Schema tools is shared by pdfcraft-cli run, an opt-in stdio MCP server and a Rust API; an opt-in, token-protected control channel can drive the desktop UI.