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