PDFree

📄 A truly free PDF editor with AI features. No watermarks. No limits. No catch.

PDFree is the honest alternative to "free" PDF tools that hit you with watermarks, task caps, paywalls, or silent uploads. It runs everywhere — macOS, iOS, Web, Windows, Linux — from one Rust engine, and processes your documents locally by default.

Status: Phase 0 complete. The Rust workspace is scaffolded and the PDFium integration is proven end-to-end (open a PDF, render pages to PNG). See CLAUDE.md for the full plan.

Architecture

One Rust core (pdfree-core), many thin platform shells. Rendering goes through PDFium — the engine Chrome uses. See docs/architecture.md.

crates/pdfree-core   PDF engine (parse, render, edit, forms, sign, convert)
crates/pdfree-ai     provider-agnostic AI layer (local-first, cloud-opt-in)
crates/pdfree-ffi    UniFFI bridge → Swift/Kotlin
crates/pdfree-wasm   wasm-bindgen bridge → browser

Quickstart

# 1. Fetch the PDFium runtime library (into vendor/pdfium/, git-ignored)
scripts/fetch-pdfium.sh

# 2. Build and test the whole workspace
scripts/build-all.sh
# or: cargo test --workspace

Minimal usage:

use pdfree_core::{Document, RenderOptions};

let doc = Document::open("contract.pdf")?;
println!("{} pages", doc.page_count());
let png = doc.render_page(0, &RenderOptions::with_dpi(150.0))?;
std::fs::write("page-1.png", png)?;

See docs/api.md for the full pdfree-core API.

Docs

• CLAUDE.md — project plan, phases, and decisions
• docs/architecture.md — engine + shells design
• docs/ai-design.md — local-first AI plan
• docs/api.md — pdfree-core API reference
• docs/pdfium-bundling.md — PDFium per-platform strategy

License

BUSL-1.1 — free for personal and commercial non-SaaS use.