Stop Writing PDF Scripts - This MCP Server Does It All

You've been there: juggling PyPDF2, pdfplumber, and custom scripts just to extract text from a research paper or merge a few invoices. Then you need to handle remote PDFs, and suddenly you're writing download logic too.

PDF Tools MCP puts an end to that workflow chaos.

The Problem: PDF Manipulation Shouldn't Be This Hard

Every developer has a folder full of half-finished PDF scripts. Extract text from this document, merge these pages, grab metadata from that file. Each PDF task becomes a mini-project with different libraries, error handling, and file management headaches.

When you're working with AI models that need to process PDFs, the friction multiplies. You're constantly context-switching between your AI workflow and manual PDF preprocessing.

A Complete PDF Toolkit Through MCP

This MCP server gives you comprehensive PDF manipulation directly in your AI workflow. No more preprocessing scripts or separate tools.

Local PDF Operations:

• Text extraction with detailed block information - perfect for feeding structured content to AI models
• Page merging to create consolidated views from multi-page documents
• Snippet creation for pulling specific sections without full document processing
• Document fusion to combine pages from multiple PDFs into unified documents
• Metadata extraction to understand document properties before processing

Remote PDF Operations:

• Direct URL processing - point it at any PDF URL and work with it immediately
• Smart downloading with proper file management and security

Real-World Productivity Gains

Research Workflow: Instead of downloading papers, converting them, and manually extracting sections, ask Claude to analyze specific pages from remote research PDFs directly through URLs.

Document Processing: Need to merge invoice pages from different months? Skip the manual PDF editor - do it programmatically through your AI workflow.

Content Analysis: Extract text blocks with precise positioning data for layout-aware document analysis, not just raw text dumps.

Report Generation: Combine specific pages from multiple reports into a single document, then immediately analyze the consolidated content.

Built for Performance and Security

Uses PyMuPDF for robust PDF handling with async operations throughout. Documents get UUID4 filenames for security, and the async architecture means you're not blocking on large PDF operations.

The MCP protocol integration means this works seamlessly with Claude Desktop and any other MCP-compatible tools you're already using.

Get Started in Minutes

Install through Smithery for Claude Desktop:

npx -y @smithery/cli install @danielkennedy1/pdf-tools-mcp --client claude

Or clone and run locally:

git clone https://github.com/danielkennedy1/pdf-tools-mcp.git
cd pdf-tools-mcp
uv pip install -e .
python -m src.main

Your PDF workflows just got significantly simpler. Instead of maintaining a collection of scripts and switching between tools, you now have comprehensive PDF capabilities directly in your AI workflow.

Time to delete those half-finished PDF scripts cluttering your projects folder.