# Claude Desktop MCP Configuration
This document explains how the MCP PDF Tools server has been configured for Claude Desktop.
## Configuration Location
The MCP configuration has been added to:
```
/home/rpm/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
```
## PDF Tools Server Configuration
The following configuration has been added to your Claude Desktop:
```json
{
"mcpServers": {
"pdf-tools": {
"command": "uv",
"args": [
"--directory",
"/home/rpm/claude/mcp-pdf-tools",
"run",
"mcp-pdf-tools"
],
"env": {
"PDF_TEMP_DIR": "/tmp/mcp-pdf-processing"
}
}
}
}
```
## What This Enables
With this configuration, all your Claude sessions will have access to:
- **extract_text**: Extract text from PDFs with multiple method support
- **extract_tables**: Extract tables from PDFs with intelligent fallbacks
- **extract_images**: Extract and filter images from PDFs
- **extract_metadata**: Get comprehensive PDF metadata and file information
- **get_document_structure**: Analyze PDF structure, outline, and fonts
- **is_scanned_pdf**: Detect if PDFs are scanned/image-based
- **ocr_pdf**: Perform OCR on scanned PDFs with preprocessing
- **pdf_to_markdown**: Convert PDFs to clean markdown format
## Environment Variables
- `PDF_TEMP_DIR`: Set to `/tmp/mcp-pdf-processing` for temporary file processing
## Backup
A backup of your original configuration has been saved to:
```
/home/rpm/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json.backup
```
## Testing
The server has been tested and is working correctly. You can verify it's available in new Claude sessions by checking for the `mcp__pdf-tools__*` functions.
## Troubleshooting
If you encounter issues:
1. **Server not starting**: Check that all dependencies are installed:
```bash
cd /home/rpm/claude/mcp-pdf-tools
uv sync --dev
```
2. **System dependencies missing**: Install required packages:
```bash
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-eng poppler-utils ghostscript python3-tk default-jre-headless
```
3. **Permission issues**: Ensure temp directory exists:
```bash
mkdir -p /tmp/mcp-pdf-processing
chmod 755 /tmp/mcp-pdf-processing
```
4. **Test server manually**:
```bash
cd /home/rpm/claude/mcp-pdf-tools
uv run mcp-pdf-tools --help
```
