jztan/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.
mcp-name: io.github.jztan/pdf-mcp
## Try it in your browser
See what your AI agent sees →
Drop in any PDF, or a whole folder of them, and watch an agent triage the corpus, search across every document at once, and read only the pages that matter, using a fraction of the tokens. 100% client-side, no install required.
## Why pdf-mcp?
| | Without pdf-mcp | With pdf-mcp |
| Large PDFs | Context overflow | Read only the pages you need |
| Finding content | Load everything | Hybrid search: BM25 keyword + semantic |
| Folders of PDFs | One document at a time | Warm, triage, and search a whole folder |
| Warming a big folder | Minutes of CPU embedding | Length-sorted small-batch CPU encode; optional CUDA embedding, one to two orders of magnitude faster on an NVIDIA card |
| Tables and charts | Lost in raw text | Structured rows, and (x, y) data from vector charts |
| Multi-column and vertical layouts | Columns interleaved | Correct reading order, including Japanese tategaki |
| Scanned PDFs | No text at all | OCR via Tesseract, parallel across pages |
| Repeated access | Re-parse every time | SQLite cache that survives restarts |
| Hidden or injected text | Silently ingested | Flagged as untrusted, nothing stripped |
## Installation
### Claude Desktop: nothing to install first
1. Download pdf-mcp.mcpb.
2. In Claude Desktop, open Settings > Extensions, drag the file onto
that page, and click Install.
3. Ask Claude about a PDF by its location, for example "Use pdf-mcp to
summarize C:\Users\me\Downloads\report.pdf", or about a whole folder.
The first start downloads pdf-mcp's components (about 250 MB) and can take a
few minutes; later starts take seconds. OCR for scanned pages is included:
the first scanned page downloads an English-only Tesseract (about 14 MB).
Needs Windows 10 or later, or macOS 13 or later (14 on Apple Silicon), and
works in Claude Desktop's Chat. Updating, uninstalling and other details are
in docs/clients.md.
### Claude Code and other MCP clients
Needs Python 3.11 or later. Install the pdf-mcp command with
uv or pipx:
bash
uv tool install pdf-mcp # or: pipx install pdf-mcp
pip install pdf-mcp works inside a virtual environment; Homebrew's Python
and recent Debian and Ubuntu refuse a system-wide pip install.
Then add it to your client. For Claude Code:
bash
claude mcp add pdf-mcp -- pdf-mcp
For VS Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, Kiro or any other MCP client, see
docs/clients.md. Then ask your agent to read a PDF.
Search, the corpus tools, tables and multi-column and CJK reading order work
out of the box. For non-English documents, see
language support. OCR on scanned
pages also needs Tesseract:
bash
brew install tesseract # macOS
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr # Ubuntu/Debian