Compress large OCR-heavy PDFs into dense packed images for agent workflows.
Most developer tooling work still happens through a UI a human drives. Optical Context MCP MCP server moves it into the conversation instead. Compress large OCR-heavy PDFs into dense packed images for agent workflows.
Compress OCR-heavy PDFs into dense packed images so agents can work with long visual documents.
The server publishes 3 tools. What each one is for:
compress_pdf — run OCR plus recomposition and create a stored jobget_job_manifest — load metadata for an existing jobget_packed_images — fetch one or more packed PNGs from an existing jobThe server ships on PyPI as optical-context-mcp, so your MCP client can launch it on demand — there is no separate build step. Add the server block to your client's configuration, restart it, and the tools register themselves.
Configuration is passed through the environment: MISTRAL_API_KEY, OPTICAL_CONTEXT_ADAPTIVE_MODEL_PATH. Treat anything key-shaped as a real credential — scope it to the minimum the server needs, and rotate it if it ever lands in a shared config.
This sits in the developer tooling group, where several servers overlap in what they claim to do but differ sharply once you actually set them up. Optical Context MCP's toolset — compress_pdf, get_job_manifest, get_packed_images — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by ChrBoebel; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.
We check each listing at SyncDev against the project's documentation before it goes live — if something here drifts out of date, it is a bug worth reporting.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| compress_pdf | run OCR plus recomposition and create a stored job |
| get_job_manifest | load metadata for an existing job |
| get_packed_images | fetch one or more packed PNGs from an existing job |
{
"mcpServers": {
"optical-context": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": ["optical-context-mcp"],
"env": {
"MISTRAL_API_KEY": "your-value",
"OPTICAL_CONTEXT_ADAPTIVE_MODEL_PATH": "your-value"
}
}
}
}Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| MISTRAL_API_KEY | Credential the server authenticates with. | Yes |
| OPTICAL_CONTEXT_ADAPTIVE_MODEL_PATH | Filesystem location the server is allowed to use. | Optional |
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