quillpdf-mcp

Local-first PDF tools — merge, split, rotate, watermark, Bates-number, clean metadata, page-count — exposed as both an MCP server (for AI agents) and a command-line tool.

Your files never leave your machine. Every operation reads and writes PDFs locally, in your own environment. The server uses only stdio transport and local filesystem I/O — it never opens a network connection or transmits your documents.

Built by Purple Directive, the same privacy-first engine behind QuillPDF. MIT licensed.

Why

Most "PDF API" tools make you upload your documents to someone else's server. For sensitive files — legal discovery, medical records, financials — that's a non-starter. quillpdf-mcp runs the PDF operations where you are: as a local CLI, or as a Model Context Protocol server an AI assistant can call. The bytes stay on your disk.

Related MCP server: mcp-pdf-utils

Install

Run on demand with npx (no install):

npx -p quillpdf-mcp quillpdf --help   # the CLI
npx quillpdf-mcp --help               # MCP server: prints setup help (your MCP client launches it over stdio)

Or install globally for the quillpdf and quillpdf-mcp commands:

npm install -g quillpdf-mcp
quillpdf --help

Requires Node.js 18 or newer.

Use it from an AI assistant (MCP)

The MCP server speaks stdio and exposes one tool per operation.

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

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

Claude Code

claude mcp add quillpdf -- npx -y quillpdf-mcp

Then ask your assistant things like "merge invoice-1.pdf and invoice-2.pdf into combined.pdf" or "Bates-number discovery.pdf with prefix ABC starting at 1." The assistant supplies file paths on your machine; the server reads and writes them locally.

A ready-to-copy config lives in examples/mcp-config.json.

Tools

Use it from the command line

# Merge (order is preserved)
quillpdf merge a.pdf b.pdf c.pdf -o combined.pdf

# Split into one file per range group → out-1.pdf (pages 1-3), out-2.pdf (page 5)
quillpdf split in.pdf --ranges "1-3,5" -o out.pdf

# Extract specific pages into a single file (reordering/duplicates allowed)
quillpdf split in.pdf --pages "5,1,1" -o extract.pdf

# Rotate every page 90°, or just some pages
quillpdf rotate in.pdf --angle 90 -o rotated.pdf
quillpdf rotate in.pdf --angle 180 --pages "2,4" -o rotated.pdf

# Watermark
quillpdf watermark in.pdf --text "DRAFT" --opacity 0.15 --position center -o wm.pdf

# Bates numbering → PLT-000001, PLT-000002, …
quillpdf bates in.pdf --prefix "PLT-" --start 1 --pad 6 -o numbered.pdf

# Strip document metadata
quillpdf clean-metadata in.pdf -o clean.pdf

# Page count (prints a number)
quillpdf page-count in.pdf

Every command has --help.

Privacy & security notes

• Local only. All PDF processing happens in-process via pdf-lib. The server communicates over stdio and never opens a network connection. (The MCP SDK bundles optional HTTP/SSE transports in node_modules, but this server only ever uses stdio, so none of that code runs.)

• Password-protected PDFs are refused, not silently unlocked. If a file is encrypted, the tool stops with a clear message rather than stripping the password for you.

• clean-metadata scope. It clears the title, author, subject, keywords, and creator fields plus the CreationDate/ModDate in the document information dictionary, and deletes the document-level XMP metadata stream — the copy Acrobat, Word, InDesign, and LibreOffice write, which is often the authoritative one. Note that pdf-lib rewrites the /Producer field with its own signature on save, so that one field is replaced rather than emptied. It does not scrub page-level annotations, embedded file attachments, or the text/image content of pages.

Not here yet (roadmap)

These need a Node image backend or OCR engine and are planned for a later release — they are not in this package today:

• compress (image re-encode)

• pdf-to-image (render pages to PNG)

• redact (true rasterize-on-redact removal)

• ocr (searchable-text layer)

They'll ship only when they can run fully locally, to keep the privacy guarantee intact.

Development

npm install
npm run build     # tsc → dist/
npm test          # builds, then runs the unit suite (node:test)

The engine (src/core.ts) is pure: bytes in, bytes out, no I/O. The CLI (src/cli.ts) and MCP server (src/server.ts) are thin front-ends over it.

License

MIT © Purple Directive. See LICENSE.

Learn more at quillpdf.com.