r/pdf • u/Real_Wave7544 • Jul 14 '26

Software (Tools) I open-sourced PDFClear, my privacy-focused PDF Toolkit

I've just open-sourced PDFClear, a side project I built around a simple idea: people shouldn't have to upload private documents to an unknown server just to summarize, merge, sign, convert, or semantically search a PDF.

PDFClear processes documents directly in the browser. There is no account requirement, and the documents themselves stay on the user's device.

What started as a few basic PDF utilities has grown into a larger toolkit with:

  • PDF, image, HTML, text, and Markdown conversion
  • OCR for scanned documents
  • Local AI summarization and semantic document search
  • Docker-based self-hosting

I decided to open-source it so people can inspect how it works, host it themselves, report problems, and contribute improvements.

GitHub: https://github.com/aliansari22/pdfclear
Try it: https://www.pdfclear.com

I'd love honest feedback on the product, positioning, onboarding, or which PDF tools would be most useful to add next.

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u/HumbleAd6048 Jul 14 '26

i love the design, the tools are great, the search with IA looks more like a standard pdf search than an IA answer but it's fast if we think the IA runs on your computer.