docstats

Docstats calculates readability scores and provides deterministic house-style linting for plain text, web pages, and PDFs. Designed as a post-hoc acceptance gate for CI/CD pipelines, PR reviews, and pre-publish editorial QA, docstats runs as an MCP server for AI coding assistants or as a FastAPI web service.

Table of Contents

• Features

• Recommended Workflow: Post-Hoc Acceptance Gate

• Quickstart

• Installation

• Agent Plugin & MCP Usage

• Server Modes

• Development & Testing

• Readability Scores

• Documentation

• Contributing

• License & Disclaimer

Related MCP server: mcp-pdf-tools

Features

• Readability scoring (Axis A): Computes consensus grade level plus 9 standard formulas (Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, and more).

• House-style linting (Axis B): Deterministic pattern checking for throat-clearing openers, binary contrast frames, non-technical filler adverbs, rhetorical em dashes, and rhythm indicators.

• Multiple inputs: Reads direct text, public web pages, and PDFs from web URLs or Google Cloud Storage (gs://).

• Agent Plugin v1.0.0: Native MCP STDIO tool (readability-docstats) and prompt skill (readability-analysis).

• Flexible runtime: Runs as a local REST API, an MCP STDIO server, or a streamable HTTP server.

Recommended Workflow: Post-Hoc Acceptance Gate

Docstats is optimized as an asynchronous acceptance gate and editorial linter rather than an in-prompt generative dial. Empirical research indicates that injecting live numeric metrics during text generation does not improve prose quality over clear textual guidance and risks artificial metric gaming. Use docstats to audit drafts, run pre-commit checks, or gate documentation CI workflows.

Quickstart

Run docstats right away with uv:

# Start the MCP server over STDIO (for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, etc.)
uv run python main.py --server-type mcp

# Or start the local REST API server
uv run uvicorn fastapi_app:fastapi_app --reload

Send a test request to the REST API:

curl -X POST "http://127.0.0.1:8000/scores/" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"text": "Docstats makes readability analysis fast, delightful, and robust."}'

Example response:

{
  "flesch_reading_ease": 45.1,
  "flesch_kincaid_grade": 8.8,
  "text_standard": "8.0",
  "word_count": 8,
  "sentence_count": 1
}

Installation

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+

• uv package manager

Setup

Clone the repository and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/ghchinoy/docstats.git
cd docstats
uv sync

(Optional) If you read PDFs from Google Cloud Storage (gs://), log in with Application Default Credentials:

gcloud auth application-default login

Agent Plugin & MCP Usage

Docstats implements the Agent Plugins v1.0.0 spec. Agent runtimes find the plugin manifest, MCP tool, and skill guidance automatically.

Manual MCP Client Setup

To configure an MCP client manually (such as in ~/.claude/settings.json or Gemini CLI):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "readability_docstats": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "python", "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/docstats/main.py", "--server-type", "mcp"],
      "cwd": "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/docstats"
    }
  }
}

Server Modes

Docstats supports three execution modes:

1. MCP STDIO Server:

   uv run python main.py --server-type mcp

2. FastAPI REST API:

   uv run uvicorn fastapi_app:fastapi_app --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8000 --reload

   Interactive Swagger docs open at http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs.

3. MCP Streamable HTTP Server:

   uv run python main.py --server-type mcp-http --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8001

Development & Testing

Run Tests

Run the test suite with pytest:

# Run all tests
uv run pytest

# Run fast unit tests only (no network needed)
uv run pytest test_unit.py

# Run tests without slow integration tests
uv run pytest -m "not slow"

Golden Set Benchmarks

Check score consistency against baseline sample files:

uv run python baseline_analysis.py

Code Quality

Run formatting and lint checks:

uv run ruff check .
uv run ruff format --check .

Readability Scores

Docstats provides the following metrics:

Documentation

The full documentation site is published at ghchinoy.github.io/docstats (built with Astro Starlight; source in site/). It covers a user-first explainer, MCP and skills integration, and technical deep dives on the linguistics and statistics.

Source-of-truth references:

• User Guide — Comprehensive guide to configuration, endpoints, extraction pipelines, and troubleshooting.

• Scoring Specification — Specification for two-axis assessment and house-style linting.

• Readability Analysis Skill — Model-facing prompt skill and interpretation guide.

Contributing

We welcome contributions!

1. Fork and clone the repository.

2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature/my-feature).

3. Run tests (uv run pytest) and linters (uv run ruff check .).

4. Check baseline scores (uv run python baseline_analysis.py).

5. Open a Pull Request.

License & Disclaimer

• License: Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE for details.

• Disclaimer: This is not an officially supported Google product.