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PDF MCP

PDF MCP is an MCP server that adds search and knowledge tools to AI assistants such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor. Agentic RAG over one PDF or a whole folder: hybrid search, selective page reads, tables, OCR. It has 147 GitHub stars, is released under the MIT license and runs locally with uvx pdf-mcp.

github.com/jztan/pdf-mcp (opens in a new tab)

Install PDF MCP

Generated from the server's MCP registry entry. Replace your-value with your own values.

Claude Desktop

claude_desktop_config.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdf-mcp": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "pdf-mcp"
      ],
      "env": {
        "PDF_MCP_CACHE_DIR": "your-value",
        "PDF_MCP_CACHE_TTL": "your-value"
      }
    }
  }
}

Settings > Developer > Edit Config. macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/, Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\. Restart Claude Desktop afterwards.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --env PDF_MCP_CACHE_DIR=your-value --env PDF_MCP_CACHE_TTL=your-value --transport stdio pdf-mcp -- uvx pdf-mcp

Cursor

.cursor/mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdf-mcp": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "pdf-mcp"
      ],
      "env": {
        "PDF_MCP_CACHE_DIR": "your-value",
        "PDF_MCP_CACHE_TTL": "your-value"
      }
    }
  }
}

Project file; use ~/.cursor/mcp.json to enable it in every project.

VS Code

.vscode/mcp.json
{
  "servers": {
    "pdf-mcp": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "pdf-mcp"
      ],
      "env": {
        "PDF_MCP_CACHE_DIR": "your-value",
        "PDF_MCP_CACHE_TTL": "your-value"
      }
    }
  }
}

Config formats checked against the official docs on Oct 7, 2026: modelcontextprotocol.io (opens in a new tab), code.claude.com (opens in a new tab), cursor.com (opens in a new tab), code.visualstudio.com (opens in a new tab).

Environment variables

Variables the server reads at startup.

NameRequiredDescription
PDF_MCP_CACHE_DIRNoDirectory for storing PDF cache (default: ~/.cache/pdf-mcp)
PDF_MCP_CACHE_TTLNoCache time-to-live in hours (default: 24)

Tools (13)

Parsed from the Tools section of the README; check the repository for the current list.

  • pdf_info

    Page count, metadata, TOC summary, scanned-page detection. Call first.

  • pdf_search

    Hybrid search (keyword + semantic), page or section granularity, paragraph or context-window excerpts with source…

  • pdf_read_pages

    Read specific pages or ranges, with OCR on demand, tables, and embedded images

  • pdf_read_all

    Read a whole document in one call, byte-capped

  • pdf_get_toc

    Full table of contents for documents with many bookmarks

  • pdf_render_pages

    Render pages as PNG for vision models: diagrams, handwriting, scans

  • pdf_extract_chart

    Chart data as exact (x, y) tables, read from plot geometry

  • pdf_corpus_warm

    Warm a folder of PDFs into the cache within a time budget

  • pdf_corpus_overview

    Per-document triage cards for a folder

  • pdf_corpus_search

    Search across a folder, with document and page provenance; excerptstyle="auto" picks the excerpt unit per query

  • pdf_cache_stats

    Per-document cache breakdown and total size

  • pdf_cache_clear

    Clear expired or all cache entries

  • server_info

    Which optional features and config are active

About PDF MCP

Agentic RAG over your PDFs, one file or a whole folder, as a single MCP tool. The agent decides when to search; pdf-mcp does the retrieval and hands back excerpts. It is an MCP server that lets Claude Code and other AI agents search one PDF or a whole folder by meaning or keyword, read only the pages that matter, and cleanly pull out tables, images, and scanned text, even from multi-column and Japanese layouts, with optional CUDA acceleration for warming large corpora.

  • ai
  • claude
  • document-processing
  • llm
  • mcp
  • pdf
  • python
  • codex-cli
  • opencode
  • mcp-server

FAQ

PDF MCP FAQ

Still curious? Email info@appsgit.com.

What is PDF MCP?

PDF MCP is an MCP server that adds search and knowledge tools to AI assistants such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor. Agentic RAG over one PDF or a whole folder: hybrid search, selective page reads, tables, OCR. It has 147 GitHub stars, is released under the MIT license and runs locally with uvx pdf-mcp. The source code is at github.com/jztan/pdf-mcp.

How do I install the PDF MCP MCP server?

Add the command uvx pdf-mcp to your MCP client: put it in claude_desktop_config.json for Claude Desktop, run claude mcp add for Claude Code, or add it to .cursor/mcp.json (Cursor) or .vscode/mcp.json (VS Code). The snippets on this page are ready to paste.

Is PDF MCP free?

The server is open source under the MIT license, so running it is free. It does not declare any required API key.

Is PDF MCP actively maintained?

The most recent commit was on Oct 4, 2026. The latest release is v3.5.0, published Oct 3, 2026. appsgit only lists MCP servers with a commit in the last six months and re-checks every server daily.