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 3.10 or later. Install the pdf-mcp command with uv or pipx:

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:

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.