pdfport

pdfport does the five PDF jobs that come up over and over: pull the text out of a file, read its document metadata, summarise it (pages, page sizes, file size, PDF version), merge several files into one, and split a file into one document per page. It works on local files only — nothing is uploaded anywhere.

The engine is a small, genuine PDF implementation written in pure TypeScript for this project. No PDF library is bundled and there are no runtime dependencies beyond the MCP SDK. The engine scans a document's indirect objects, follows the Catalog to its Pages tree, decodes plain and FlateDecode content streams, and recovers text from the standard text-showing operators. Merges renumber the source objects into one new object graph with a rebuilt page tree; splits emit one document per page the same way; both write a freshly computed cross-reference table.

Scope — what the engine does and does not handle

Supported: simple PDFs with a flat page tree (a Catalog whose Pages node lists Page objects directly — the shape common generators produce, and the shape pdfport's own merge/split write), uncompressed or FlateDecode streams, literal and hex strings in content and in the Info dictionary, and per-page MediaBox sizes (inherited from the Pages node when a page omits its own).

Not supported: encrypted files, object streams and compressed cross-reference streams (PDF 1.5+ compact files), nested page trees, embedded-font encodings that need a ToUnicode map to read, and form/annotation fidelity on merge or split. Files outside the subset fail with a plain error saying what was not found — pdfport never returns invented text or metadata.

Related MCP server: pdfeverything

Install

npx @reneturcios/pdfport get-pdf-info ./report.pdf

Or run the container image:

docker run -i ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/pdfport

The container defaults to the MCP server (see below). Pass CLI arguments to use it as a CLI instead.

CLI

# Print the document's text
pdfport extract-text ./report.pdf

# Print the Info-dictionary metadata (plus page count) as JSON
pdfport get-metadata ./report.pdf

# Print page count, page sizes, file size and PDF version as JSON
pdfport get-pdf-info ./report.pdf

# Merge inputs, in order, into one output file
pdfport merge ./combined.pdf ./a.pdf ./b.pdf ./c.pdf

# Split into <name>-page-1.pdf, <name>-page-2.pdf, ... in a directory
pdfport split ./report.pdf ./report-pages

# Start the MCP server
pdfport mcp

pdfport --version

Exit codes: 0 on success, 1 when a file is missing or a document cannot be processed (the error says which), 2 for usage errors.

MCP server

One bin serves both faces. The mcp subcommand starts a stdio MCP server:

npx -y @reneturcios/pdfport mcp

MCP client configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdfport": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@reneturcios/pdfport", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

Development

npm install
npm run build   # tsc -> dist/
npm test        # node test runner over test/*.test.ts, no network
npm run dev     # run the CLI from source via tsx

The test suite builds small PDFs from raw strings — plain and FlateDecode content streams — and drives the default engine end-to-end: extraction (including TJ arrays and literal-string escapes), metadata, info, merge and split are all asserted against the real implementation, then the file facade is exercised against real files in a temporary directory.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.