Illustrator Figure MCP

Rebuild scientific figures as editable Adobe Illustrator artwork — and prove the result is structurally correct.

Why this exists

Plenty of MCP servers can draw in Illustrator. They give a model hands but no eyes: nothing checks whether the thing it just drew is right. So the model draws, reports success, and the figure has a label overflowing its box, an arrow ending in the middle of an unrelated rectangle, and three "aligned" panels that are 3pt out.

The valuable part isn't the drawing. It's the validate-and-repair loop, on two channels that check different things:

Geometry is proved. Similarity is judged. Neither alone is enough — a traced figure passes every geometric check while being completely non-editable, and a good-looking render says nothing about structure.

audit_figure returning passed: true means no hard geometric failure. It does not mean the figure is correct.

Related MCP server: Illustrator MCP Vectorizer

Quick start

Requires macOS, Adobe Illustrator (running), Node 20+, and Claude Code.

npm install && npm run build
claude mcp add illustrator-figure -- node "$PWD/dist/index.js"
cp -R skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

Grant Automation permission at the first prompt, or via System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation. Then ask Claude to "recreate this figure in Illustrator" with a reference image attached.

→ Full usage guide — every tool, two worked examples, and how to read an audit report.

It works on real figures

The schematic above was rebuilt from a reference image: 124 objects, 17 connectors bound to their boxes, 0 rasters. The audit flagged 11 arrows crossing panel titles — which were in the original figure too, so it found a legibility bug in the source.

→ See it rebuilt pass by pass, with the audit output at every step — including the pass where the deterministic audit was silent and only the rendered image caught the problem.

Charts work the same way, except the geometry is computed from data rather than traced:

Reconstruct, never trace

Tracing preserves appearance and destroys semantics, which is the whole point of rebuilding a figure. Three defences make the shortcut hard to take:

• Semantic tagging at creation. Every object gets a UUID and a semantic type as it is made, so the auditor can tell constructed objects from foreign geometry.

• trace-signature. Image Trace's expandTracing() drops one untagged group holding a pile of untagged paths. That, dense untagged paths, and bulk geometry exceeding the declared draw log are all hard failures.

• The raster gate. place_image refuses any placement that isn't provably irreducible.

A missing boolean is a failure, not a false — silence is not a declaration. Enforcement is on the creation path, not in the auditor: an auditor-only check is bypassed by simply not auditing.

Connectors don't follow their objects

Illustrator has no connector primitive. An arrow is a PathItem with no relationship to the box it points at — move the box and the arrow stays put, silently wrong.

add_connector records the binding (source, target, attachment sites) on the path. reflow_connectors re-solves the geometry from the objects' current bounds. audit_figure reports connector-detached when the drawn path no longer agrees with its binding.

Any operation that moves or resizes a connected object must be followed by reflow_connectors.

Routing is straight, orthogonal, or curved — a bezier that leaves and arrives perpendicular to the attachment edges, the standard pathway-diagram look. The auditor samples the actual curve rather than the chord between anchors, so it checks where the ink is. Arrowheads are drawn as filled triangles, since Illustrator exposes no arrowhead property to scripting.

Tools added by this fork

Plus the raster gate on place_image and semantic tagging on every create_* tool. The remaining 66 tools are upstream's.

draw_sequence is the one to reach for: nine objects — boxes, area-text labels, two bound connectors — build and audit in roughly 750 ms, where one call per object would be nine round trips.

The four roles

Ask for a figure and recreate-scientific-figure coordinates the loop:

Each region must pass before the next begins; then the whole figure runs the same loop.

Documentation

Development

npm test        # 260 tests, any platform

The ported geometry is pure ES3, so the .jsx modules are loaded into a VM and the Liang–Barsky and segment-crossing maths is tested without Illustrator. Anything touching Illustrator must be tested on macOS with it running — see CLAUDE.md for the constraints that bite (ES3, UUID-before-metadata ordering, pageItems snapshotting).

Credits

• Tool layer forked from ie3jp/illustrator-mcp-server (MIT) — transport, JSX runner, UUID identity, note metadata, and 66 Illustrator tools. See LICENSE.

• The two-channel validation loop, the audit taxonomy, and the four-role protocol are ported from icebird1998/scientific-illustrator, which implements them for draw.io, PowerPoint, and WPS. The maths is backend-neutral; the object model is not.

Not affiliated with Adobe.