PaperPilot is a locally run PDF and document toolkit built in Rust, designed both for people and for AI agents that need document-editing tools. Its central claim is privacy: files are processed on the user’s machine or in browser memory rather than uploaded to a cloud service. A shared Rust engine powers several interfaces, including a command-line tool for scripts and batch jobs, an MCP server for coding assistants and other compatible clients, a local REST API, a browser-based WebAssembly version, and a Tauri desktop app. The project emphasizes consistent behavior across these interfaces and avoids requiring Chromium or a C++ runtime.
The current V0.6 feature set covers common PDF organization tasks such as merging, splitting, rotating, deleting, reordering, and extracting pages, as well as booklet and N-up layouts. It can compress PDFs, extract text, perform OCR with a pure-Rust PaddleOCR implementation, add watermarks, validate or remove signatures, scan for personally identifiable information, and sanitize documents. It also converts Excel data to JSON or CSV. Planned releases would add PDF conversions to and from formats such as Markdown, HTML, Word, and PowerPoint, along with encryption, signing, redaction, forms, rendering, repair, comparison, and PDF/A support. The community edition is Apache 2.0 licensed; enterprise features are developed separately.
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