PDF Tools v0.10.0

Read this first if you already use PDF Tools

PDF Tools no longer reaches into Documents, Downloads, and Desktop by default. Earlier versions fell back to those three folders whenever your host did not supply an allowed-directories setting. That fallback was silent: when configuration did not arrive, the extension accessed folders you had never approved and nothing in the interface said so. It is removed. The extension now works only in the directories you configure.

If PDF Tools starts refusing a folder it used to open, that folder is no longer in the allowed set — set your allowed directories (and, if you use it, the default PDFs folder) in the extension's settings, and it will work again.

If your allowed folders stopped working on an earlier version, this update is the fix. Claude Desktop hands the extension its folder settings without resolving the ${HOME} prefix, and earlier versions discarded every entry that still contained one. Two ways that bit people. If you never opened the settings, the built-in defaults arrived unresolved and were dropped. If you did open the settings and typed a path in the ${HOME}/... style the fields display, that entry was dropped too. So was every other entry written that way, including the ones filled in for you. In practice that usually meant all of them. Either way the extension fell back to Documents, Downloads and Desktop and said nothing. This release resolves those paths, so your configured folders are the folders it uses.

Still on an older version and cannot upgrade yet? Replace ${HOME} with your real home path (for example /Users/yourname/Documents) in every field, including the ones that were filled in for you. Literal paths were never affected.

The prompt shortcuts work now

The 14 built-in prompts under the "+" menu — fill a W-9, compare contracts, extract 1099 data, and the rest — have never worked correctly in Claude Desktop until this release. Half were refused by the host before reaching the model; the other half were misread as an attachment and answered by asking you to upload a file the extension was built to read from disk. They now open a PDF from your computer, find it, and start the task.

Fixes

• Emoji and non-Latin text work in prompt inputs. A recent change had started rejecting ordinary characters — a warning sign, a check mark, a heart, keycap digits, and several national flags — in the fields you type into a prompt. That is fixed; those inputs are accepted again.
• Large folders no longer flood the conversation. Listing a folder with thousands of PDFs returned every path at once. It now returns up to 200 at a time, reports the true total, and lets you page through the rest.
• Clearer messages when a folder does not exist, when a listing is empty, and when a folder is outside the allowed set.

Also in this release

• A bounded accessibility inspector that reports catalog-level signals with fixed limitations and requires human review — it does not establish PDF/UA, WCAG, or legal accessibility (#89).
• Better text recovery from older TeX documents: Type-3 glyph enrollment now covers math extension, symbol, and italic slots (#90), and recovery no longer depends on which tool produced the file, with a bound legacy corpus that records what it still cannot read (#93).
• Reliability work: run-binding cleanup ordering (#87), renderer policy derived from the platform in the render suite (#88), and five defects found by adversarial review of the merged tree (#92).
• Under the hood, the filesystem boundary was rebuilt: it is established only from configuration you supply (#94), path handlers are bound to the exact file the check approved (#95, #96), a stored configuration layer was added for plugin installs (#99), a read-only tool reports which folders are reachable and why (#100), and the Windows fix above (#103).
• Groundwork for packaging PDF Tools as an Agent Plugin, buildable from source with npm run build:plugin. No plugin bundle ships with this release (#97).

Upgrade note

The only action most users need to take is the one at the top: if a folder stops working, add it to your allowed directories in settings. Everything else is automatic.

If you installed PDF Tools from the Claude Extensions directory you are probably coming from v0.8.6, so this update also brings everything from the v0.9.x line: PDF-to-Markdown conversion, document comparison, and page-level analysis.

Verifying what you downloaded

pdf-toolkit-mcp.mcpb  sha256  3b24dc4e1866121fd86ece21ee4b33d9cde821f6fabdadf02919c7640ccdf723
pdf-toolkit-mcp.zip   sha256  6b9743f760bf0ec03117b63d12b38fb083c58c119c56d0f7d4fa06cc6ba73ea7

Install the .mcpb in Claude Desktop by dragging it onto Settings → Extensions. The .zip is the standalone package for MCP clients such as Cursor.