DSH PDF Reader
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Read PDFs alongside your DeepSeek Harness conversation. Let the model find relevant passages, annotate them, navigate to the source, and return to your previous reading position.
I read papers and books in PDF form. The readers I tried lacked multi-step back navigation, while AI explanation and translation often required another subscription. I built this plugin for my own DSH workspace.
Features
- Read and navigate: continuous scrolling, zoom, thumbnails, text search, and multi-step back history with selectable destinations.
- Annotate and bookmark: highlights, underlines, strikeouts, comments, draggable and resizable notes, and editing of the PDF's built-in bookmark tree.
- Translate and explain: word meanings, pronunciation and examples; phrase and sentence translations; questions attached to multiple text passages or image regions, sent together to the current conversation.
- Agent control: read, search, annotate, edit bookmarks and fill existing AcroForm fields in the same draft as the user.
- Save and recover: undo/redo, draft recovery, save/save as, and source-file conflict detection.
- OCR and retrieval: region capture, text recognition and experimental semantic search with your own embedding service. Disk-backed indexes include scanned-page text and image descriptions, resume interrupted work, and survive restarts and annotation-only saves.
Agent highlights a passage and adds a comment
Multi-step navigation and back history
Install
Validated with DSH 0.2.1-rc.5; other supported versions are declared in package.json.
GUI: open Plugins → Add plugin, enter @dylanl1/dsh-plugin-pdf, install, then click Enable now.
CLI: replace <profile> with your profile:
dsh plugin --profile <profile> add @dylanl1/dsh-plugin-pdf
For Desktop, install its bundled CLI through Manage dsh Command… in the app menu. Launch Desktop once, fully quit it, install with --profile desktop, then reopen it. A separately npm-installed CLI cannot manage Desktop's plugins.
Native components install automatically; no local compilation is needed. Supported platforms: macOS (Apple Silicon/Intel), Windows x64, and glibc Linux (x64/arm64).
Open a local PDF from DSH's file sidebar. AI features use your configured models or extension engines. Semantic retrieval requires a separately configured embedding service and is off by default. PDFs with an enabled active policy prepare their index in the background on open; OCR and image descriptions can be enabled independently and may call remote services and incur charges. See SPEC for limits.
Settings save automatically. Select engines in PDF settings; each PDF independently enables OCR and image-description indexing under Search → Current PDF index. Update indexes when needed to reuse cached results; disabling semantic search takes effect immediately.
Agent tools
- Documents:
pdf_current, pdf_open, pdf_close, pdf_info, pdf_status.
- Reading:
pdf_page_read, pdf_page_render.
- Search and evidence:
pdf_keyword_search, pdf_semantic_search, pdf_evidence_read.
- Annotations:
pdf_annotation_list, pdf_annotation_create, pdf_annotation_update, pdf_annotation_delete.
- Bookmarks:
pdf_bookmark_list, pdf_bookmark_edit.
- Forms:
pdf_form_inspect, pdf_form_fill.
- Navigation and saving:
pdf_page_jump, pdf_save.
- Images:
ocr_recognize, image_understand.
pdf_open opens documents in the background; navigation requires a visible Reader. Agent edits go straight into the draft; overwriting the source still requires user approval. See the tool documentation for parameters and examples.
Extend engines
OCR, image understanding, translation and embedding support third-party implementations. Build an independent DSH Host plugin, declare this package as a peer dependency, register your backend with the corresponding service through the public SDK, and install it in the same Host profile. It then appears in PDF settings.
Start with http-engines in examples/, an independent plugin providing HTTP OCR and image-understanding backends. See engine extensions for API and lifecycle contracts.
Architecture
flowchart TB
Reader["Client · PDF Reader"] <--> RPC
Model["DSH conversation model"] -- "Tool calls" --> Features
subgraph Host
RPC["Authenticated RPC"] --> Features["PDF domain capabilities"]
Features --> Copy["Shared working copy · Drafts and undo"]
Features --> Search["Retrieval and evidence"]
Features --> Engines["Extensible AI engines"]
Search --> Copy
Search --> Engines
Search --> Index[("Disk index and checkpoints")]
Copy --> PDF["PDFium · pdf-lib"]
Copy --> Storage["Files and draft storage"]
end
The Reader and agent tools share Host business logic and a working copy within the same resource session; edits synchronize both ways. A native PDFium worker handles rendering and text extraction. See the architecture.
Development
npm ci
npm run native:build
npm run build
Checks and tests: npm run check, npm run test:web, npm run test:coverage:project. See also retrieval configuration and benchmarks and packaging and releases.
License
MIT. Published packages include the third-party licenses for their native components and dependencies.
