PDF Inspector MCP Server

A lightweight, zero-configuration TypeScript MCP server that inspects local PDF files using standard, widely-adopted libraries.

Features

• extract_text — Extracts raw embedded text from PDFs using pdf-parse.

• count_pages — Returns the total number of pages in a PDF.

• ocr_pdf — Renders PDF pages to images and performs OCR with tesseract.js for image-based (scanned) PDFs.

Related MCP server: benspdf

Dependencies

All dependencies install with a standard npm install and require no external binary setup beyond what npm provides.

Quick Start

npm install
npm run build
npm start

Or run directly with tsx during development:

npm run dev

Running with an MCP Client

The server communicates over stdio, the standard MCP transport. Use it with Claude Code, VS Code, Cursor, or any host that launches node dist/index.js.

Example claude_desktop_config.json snippet:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdf-inspector": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/pdf-inspector-mcp/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

extract_text

count_pages

ocr_pdf

Note: ocr_pdf uses pdfjs-dist to render each page to an image, then passes the PNG to tesseract.js. For multi-page PDFs this can take several seconds per page.

Zero-Config Design

• No .env files or external services required.

• pdf-parse handles text extraction with no setup.

• tesseract.js bundles WASM and language data automatically.

• pdfjs-dist uses the bundled pdf.worker.mjs file.

• canvas relies on standard npm prebuilds.