NanoPDF MCP Server

NanoPDF MCP Server is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementation that brings AI-powered PDF editing and generation capabilities directly to Claude Desktop. It enables users to modify existing PDF pages or generate new ones using Google's Gemini 3 Pro model, all within a privacy-focused local environment.

🚀 Key Features

• AI-Driven Editing: Modify PDF slides using natural language prompts.

• Smart Generation: Create new, visually consistent slides after any page.

• Visual Previews: View specific PDF pages as high-quality images.

• Privacy First: All versioning and temporary files are stored locally on your machine.

• State Preservation: Uses Tesseract OCR to maintain searchable text layers in AI-generated pages.

• Version Control: Built-in undo functionality for safe experimentation.

Related MCP server: 1pdf

📋 Prerequisites

System Dependencies

The server requires poppler (for PDF rendering) and tesseract (for OCR) installed on your system.

• macOS (Homebrew):

  brew install poppler tesseract

• Ubuntu/Debian:

  sudo apt-get install poppler-utils tesseract-ocr

Environment Variables

A Google Gemini API key is required to power the AI features.

• GEMINI_API_KEY: Your Google AI Studio API key.

🛠️ Installation & Setup

1. Development Environment

This project uses uv for lightning-fast Python package management.

# Navigate to the server directory
cd mcp-server

# Install dependencies
uv sync

2. Configure Claude Desktop

Add the NanoPDF server to your Claude Desktop configuration:

Path: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nanopdf": {
      "command": "/Users/username/.local/bin/uv", # replace with your uv path
      "args": [
        "run",
        "--directory",
        "/Users/username/nano-pdf-mcp/mcp-server", # replace with your mcp-server path
        "server.py"
      ]
    }
  }
}

📖 Usage Guide

For detailed tool descriptions and workflow examples, please refer to the Usage Guide.

Core Workflow

1. Open PDF: open_pdf(pdf_path="/path/to/document.pdf")

2. Edit/Add: edit_pdf_page(session_id="...", page_number=1, prompt="...")

📂 Project Structure

• mcp-server/: Core MCP server implementation.

  • server.py: Main entry point and tool definitions.

  • mcp_pdf_utils.py: PDF processing, OCR, and rendering logic.

  • mcp_ai_utils.py: Gemini Pro Vision API integration.

  • history_manager.py: Local session and version history tracker.

  • output/: Local storage for sessions and previews.

• LICENSE: Project license (MIT).

• USAGE.md: Detailed usage instructions and examples.

🤝 Acknowledgements

Based on the original NanoPDF project. Adapted for the Model Context Protocol.

📄 License

MIT License