Does it work without any external AI models?

Yes. The default package works out of the box for selectable‑text PDFs, rendering, crops, trust reports, and accessibility reports. OCR for scanned pages and visual enrichment are optional provider‑enabled features configured by the deployment environment.

What are the runtime requirements?

Node.js ≥22.13 is required. No OCR models, vision models, Ollama, LM Studio, or cloud credentials are needed by default.

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PDF Reader (@Sylphlab/Pdf MCP Server

📄 The PDF intelligence layer for AI agents — Agent Document Twin, evidence-first extraction, visual crops, OCR provenance, trust reports, and

Local serverstdioTypeScript

What is the PDF Reader (@Sylphlab/Pdf MCP Server?

📄 The PDF intelligence layer for AI agents — Agent Document Twin, evidence-first extraction, visual crops, OCR provenance, trust reports, and benchmark-gated

What it actually does

Turn PDFs into structured text, tables, OCR, visual evidence, and page-level citations — locally — via SDK, CLI, or MCP.

More MCP options

Compare MCP servers by category, or browse hosted MCP servers if you prefer an endpoint over a local process.

Maintainer setup documentation.

Recorded tools

Check the linked publisher documentation and your connected client's tool list. Names and availability can vary with the server version and account permissions.

Tool	What it does
read_pdf	Smart default: markdown, tables, structure, OCR, citations
search_pdf	Find page + snippet matches before deep reading
pdf_evidence	Crops, renders, inspect, focused evidence ops
persistent_warm	long-lived server, repeated identical local read_pdf after warm-up
startup_inclusive	spawn + initialize + one task

How to install the PDF Reader (@Sylphlab/Pdf MCP Server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdf-reader-mcp-sylphlab": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@sylphx/pdf-reader-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.

Example prompts to try

“Use PDF Reader (@Sylphlab/Pdf to Export.”
“Use PDF Reader (@Sylphlab/Pdf to Roadmap.”
“Use PDF Reader (@Sylphlab/Pdf to Doc.”

Frequently asked questions

It is a multi‑layer output (lossless, visual, semantic, evidence, agent) that keeps the PDF readable by agents while preserving the provenance needed to verify answers – page numbers, bounding boxes, crop IDs, and extraction methods.