pdffr-mcp

An MCP server that gives any agent — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, your own — a local, private PDF → Markdown tool backed by pdffr. Born-digital pages decompile from glyph geometry in milliseconds; scans and screenshots get on-device OCR only where the text layer can't explain the ink. Nothing leaves the machine.

Install

Claude Desktop / Claude Code / Cursor / Windsurf — add to your MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdffr": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "pdffr-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code one-liner:

claude mcp add pdffr -- npx -y pdffr-mcp

Requires Node 20+. The first run downloads the OCR model for the requested language (English by default) into the OS temp directory.

Tools

pdf_to_markdown

Decompile a PDF to Markdown. Give it one of path, url or base64.

Argument	Type	Notes
path	string	absolute or relative file path
url	string	fetched with the server's network access
base64	string	raw PDF bytes
pages	string	e.g. "1-3,7"; default all
ocr	boolean	escalate unexplained ink to OCR (default true)
lang	string	tesseract language(s), e.g. "deu", "eng+ara" (default "eng")
maxChars	number	truncate the result (default 200 000) — the response says if it did

Returns the Markdown, followed by a one-line stats footer (pages, time, OCR regions).

pdf_outline

Headings only — level, text and page — so an agent can decide which pages to read before paying for them. Same inputs (path / url / base64, ocr, lang).

pdf_tables

Every table as JSON rows ([{ page, rows: string[][] }]). Same inputs.

Why not a vision model

A PDF already knows where every glyph is. pdffr reads that geometry directly and reserves OCR for the pixels the text layer doesn't explain, so a 30-page report comes back in well under a second and a scanned invoice in a couple of seconds — with no API key and no upload. See the architecture notes.

MIT © Amer Sarhan