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zed-pdf-lsp

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zed-pdf-lsp is a language server, written in Rust, that lets the Zed editor open PDF files. When Zed opens a PDF, the server extracts its text and presents it as readable Markdown.

Features

  • Keeps paragraphs and headings, and renders multi-page PDFs page by page.
  • Handles corrupted, encrypted and image-only PDFs with clear errors instead of crashing.
  • Converts asynchronously, so the editor never freezes, with a 10-second timeout and a 500 MB memory limit per file.
  • Logs in a structured format.

How it's built

It is built on tower-lsp for the Language Server Protocol and pdf-extract for reading PDFs, and the code is split into the server, message handling, a document registry and the converter. Besides ordinary tests it uses property-based testing with proptest, which generates random inputs to find edge cases. A GitHub Actions workflow builds and tests it.

See also

2026