PDFForge Pro

A native, professional PDF editor for Linux, with an MCP server that lets Claude and other AI assistants work on your PDFs locally.

Version française (full documentation)

Why

Linux has no free editor at the level of Acrobat, and most PDF tools for AI agents upload your files to a cloud service. PDFForge does everything on your machine.

Editor features

• Edit text in the document's own font. The font embedded in the PDF is reused, not a lookalike. Only the changed characters are rewritten, and the rest of the line is repositioned to the exact point. When fidelity is impossible, the status bar says so instead of hiding it.
• Annotate, comment, draw, sign (including PAdES / PKCS#7 signatures with X.509 certificates and RFC 3161 timestamps)
• Organise pages: merge, split, reorder, rotate, delete
• OCR scanned documents into searchable text, with deskewing and per-word confidence
• Redact for real: find IBANs, card numbers, national IDs, emails, and remove them from the file, not just cover them
• Forms: fill AcroForms, with live recalculation of Acrobat formulas
• Compare two versions and detect tampering traces
• Bank statements to Excel: extract date, label and amount lines
• Export to Word (.docx), LibreOffice (.odt/.rtf), Excel, PowerPoint, images and text
• Archive and repair: PDF/A conversion with verification, web optimisation, repair of damaged files, PDF/UA accessibility audit and fixes
• Encryption (AES-256), watermarks, compression, unlimited undo/redo
• Stays fast on large documents

MCP server

The editor's engines are exposed to any MCP client (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor...). Everything runs locally: no file is sent anywhere, and tools that change a document always write a new file (the source is only replaced with overwrite=true).

claude mcp add pdfforge -- uvx --from "pdfforge-pro[mcp]" pdfforge-mcp

Or with pip: pip install "pdfforge-pro[mcp]", then claude mcp add pdfforge -- pdfforge-mcp. OCR needs Tesseract (sudo apt install tesseract-ocr).

For Claude Desktop, in claude_desktop_config.json:

{ "mcpServers": { "pdfforge": { "command": "uvx", "args": ["--from", "pdfforge-pro[mcp]", "pdfforge-mcp"] } } }

Example requests: "remove every IBAN and email from this folder before I send it", "put my September statements in a spreadsheet", "has this contract been changed since it was signed?".

Install and run

pip install pdfforge-pro && pdfforge   # or, from a clone:
make run        # launch the editor
make test       # run the test suite
make deb        # build a Debian package

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later, because PDFForge is built on PyMuPDF (AGPL-3.0).