Everything you use Acrobat for, day to day — free, full-featured, and it never leaves your computer.
Plus the legal workflows built in: verified redaction, Bates numbering, exhibit binders, and e-filing prep.
I built this because editing a file that's already on your machine shouldn't need an account and a cloud trip first. There's more to that story a couple scrolls down — why I built it, and why it's free
Checking GitHub for the latest release…
RaioPDF is in active development. The first signed Windows installer ships here first.
Watch the repo on GitHub →
Why this exists
Nobody at my firm likes dealing with Acrobat. The bloat stresses computers, the licensing quirks can bring work to a standstill, it constantly pushes features nobody asked for — and we're paying thousands for the privilege. Editing a file that's already sitting on your own computer shouldn't need an account, a cloud upload, and a cavalcade of minor annoyances.
So, in this age of agentic coding, I asked how hard it'd be to build a fully featured PDF program the old fashioned way. Turns out, not that hard — idea to working prototype in about twelve hours, and I'm a lawyer, not an engineer. RaioPDF is the other way of doing it: a full, genuinely useful PDF suite — including the less-glamorous legal stuff like true redaction and Bates numbering — given away for free, running entirely on your own machine, permanently.
You don't need a subscription and a login screen to make solid software — you just have to build it. And once someone proves that, "this is just how PDF software works now" stops being true. That's really the point: not to out-feature any particular vendor, but to show a firm doesn't have to accept whatever terms it's handed for a task this basic.
Jacob — attorney, and the one who built RaioPDF
Your price stops going up. Your files never leave.
No subscription that creeps up every renewal. No cloud round-trip to open a file that's already sitting on your own machine.
Four ways it fits into a real day at the firm
Download the installer, open it, use it.
No account screen, no sign-in, no "create a free account to continue."
Drop in a scanned PDF, hit Make Searchable.
OCR runs entirely offline — no upload, no wait on a server.
One click, "Prepare for Filing."
Pick your court's e-filing pack, get a prep checklist and a rule-cited preflight report, and RaioPDF normalizes every page and splits an oversized file into properly labeled, sequential, portal-compliant parts.
"Combine with Exhibits."
Assemble a motion or brief with exhibit files in order, auto-stamped ("Exhibit A," configurable) and auto-bookmarked.
A full day-to-day Acrobat replacement, plus the legal workflows built in
See the legal workflows in motion
The everyday Acrobat replacement
View, search, and organize (merge, split, reorder, extract, insert, rotate, crop, repair). Annotate with highlight, underline, strikethrough, freehand draw, shapes, callouts, text boxes, and comments. Fill forms, sign — at $0, permanently, no watermarks or nag screens.
Honest text layers — the status bar says plainly whether a document's text is verified searchable, missing, or garbled. "Fix garbled text" rebuilds a bad layer offline, and refuses to claim success it can't verify. Not just a feature — it's the whole voice of this product: never claim more than it can check.
Unlock PDFs — save a decrypted copy of a password- or owner-restricted PDF, supplying the password yourself when one's required. The original stays untouched. (Adding password protection isn't in this build yet.)
Native MCP integration — still no AI built into RaioPDF itself, but the installer bundles an off-by-default connector exposing 25 local tools so your own AI agents can drive the toolbox.
In-app help for every tool, offline — the same articles are published at the Help link above.
The legal workflows, built in
Jurisdiction packs for e-filing — Florida Courts E-Filing Portal, Federal CM/ECF, Georgia (eFileGA and PeachCourt), and Indiana (IEFS). Every constraint cites its authority and the date it was last verified; Florida is the default pack. Guidance, not legal advice.
True redaction — content is actually removed and verified by re-extraction, not a black box drawn over text that's still there underneath. The verifier is garble-aware: a broken text layer can't fake a clean result, and if verification fails, no output is written at all.
Filing packet builder — assemble a multi-document filing as one packet with a manifest, including document-level checks your court expects before a filing goes out.
Production sets — Bates-numbered discovery productions from a document set: confidentiality designations, index files, volume splits.
Batch cleanup — queue OCR, compression, sanitizing, and metadata scrubbing across many PDFs at once, against a jurisdiction pack.
e-filing preflight report with the rule citation for each requirement attached, so you can verify the source yourself.
Sensitive-info scanner — assistive detection of SSNs and account numbers before a filing goes out. One honest flag: never trust AI with legal reasoning — verify before you rely on it.
Bates numbering across an entire document set in one pass — one continuous sequence across a whole folder.
Metadata scrubbing before production or filing — inspect what a document carries, then strip it without touching the pages.
Equip your AI with Raio
RaioPDF doesn't have an AI built in — on purpose. What it has is a connector: point your own AI at it, Claude or anything else that speaks MCP, and it can drive the same tools you'd use by hand, right down to highlighting every clause that matches a phrase. Off by default. Nothing leaves your machine.
- Your own AI — Claude, or anything that speaks MCP
- 25 local tools — highlight, redact, Bates, split, OCR…
- On-device — nothing leaves your computer
- Off by default — you flip it on in Preferences
The spirit airlines of software is arriving, and even if you don't like it, the Adobes, Microsofts, and others in the world are going to have to start competing with software that is free, convenient, reliable, and easy to use.Why now
What RaioPDF is not
Not "AI-powered." No AI features built into RaioPDF — if I wanted an AI summary I could go to a million other more useful places first.
Not released yet. Pre-alpha, no promised date. But if you want it, I'll give it to you.
Windows first. macOS later — no date promised.
Not trying to win a features arms race. This isn't about beating anyone spec-for-spec — it's about proving the free, local, and genuinely competitive alternative can exist at all.