pdflens-mcp

An MCP server for reading PDFs, coded by human, designed for AI.

⚠️ Out-of-maintenance notice ⚠️

Pdflens MCP is designed to use the MCP Root mechanism for privacy and security boundary within workspaces, so the user can auto-approve all Pdflens MCP tool calls, knowing that LLMs will not accidentally upload PDF contents outside user’s workspaces to LLM inference providers.

However, MCP decided to deprecate the Root mechanism (SEP-2577), and will remove it at around June 2027. The documentation also states that my approach to use MCP Root for access control is wrong.

Until MCP provides an alternative mechanism (e.g., SEP-1708), maintaining the core functionality of this MCP Server is impossible. Therefore, I am pausing the maintenance of this project until I find any alternative method to allow auto-approved PDF reading. Current coding agents may still be able to use Pdflens MCP for now, but newer coding agents will eventually be incompatible with it.

When the day comes, please try other options, for example, running pdftotext and pdftoppm commands inside terminal sandboxes. VS Code supports sandboxes since 1.109, and Zed since 1.14.2. For OCR requirements, please check Firecrawl/pdf-inspector.

Provided tools

• get_pdf_num_pages
• read_pdf_as_text
• read_pdf_page_as_image‡

‡ Not all MCP clients support images.

Usage

1. Install Rust compiler: https://rustup.rs/

2. Download and build pdflens-mcp from crates.io

   cargo install --git https://codeberg.org/m13253/pdflens-mcp.git pdflens-mcp
   

   Usually, the program is installed to $HOME/.cargo/bin/pdflens-mcp. You can use cargo install --root /another/path pdflens-mcp to set a custom installation path.

3. Add this MCP server to your MCP client of choice.

   (Note: We use sh to expand ~ to your actual home directory. If you are using Microsoft Windows, please instead put the full path to pdflens-mcp.exe to "command" and leave "args" empty.)

   1. If your MCP client supports mcp.json:

      {
        "mcpServers": {
          "pdflens": {
            "command": "sh",
            "args": ["-c", "exec ~/.cargo/bin/pdflens-mcp"]
          }
        }
      }
      

   2. Visual Studio Code:

      code --add-mcp "{\"name\": \"pdflens\", \"command\": \"sh\", \"args\": [\"-c\", \"exec ~/.cargo/bin/pdflens-mcp\"]}"
      

   3. Codex

      [mcp_servers.pdflens]
      command = "sh"