pdffr MCP server

pdffr

A PDF decompiler, not an image reader. PDF → Markdown in the browser or Node, in milliseconds for born-digital pages — with on-device OCR spent only on the pixels the text layer can't explain.

Try it in your browser → — drop any PDF; it never leaves the tab.

import { decompile } from 'pdffr';

const { markdown, stats } = await decompile(file);
// stats.firstOutputMs ≈ 150ms for a typical report; the file never leaves the tab

npx pdffr report.pdf -o report.md

Why this exists

Every PDF→Markdown tool sits at one of two extremes:

~80% of real-world PDFs are born-digital: every glyph's exact coordinates, size and font are already in the file. pdffr treats PDF as what it is — a drawing program — and decompiles the drawing back into structure:

• Geometry-native decompilation. Glyph runs → lines → an XY-cut reading-order tree over whitespace → headings (font-size clustering), paragraphs (leading analysis), nested lists (marker glyph + indent), tables (ruling lines from the content stream, or column x-alignment), inline bold/italic/, math fonts and sub/superscripts transliterated to $LaTeX$, rotated text re-framed upright, running header/footer stripping, hyphenation repair. No rasterization. Milliseconds per page.
• Render-diff oracle. When a page carries bitmaps or thin text coverage, the page is rendered once, the raster's ink mask is computed, and the dilated boxes of every native glyph are erased from it. What's left is ink the text layer cannot explain — scans, stamps, screenshots with burned-in text. Exact image rectangles from the content stream (CTM-tracked) sharpen the regions further. Only those regions go to OCR.
• One IR for both sources. OCR words come back with boxes and confidence, get gated by a text-plausibility test (confidence alone lies on icons and charts), and enter the same geometry engine as native glyphs. Structure recovery is source-agnostic.
• Parallel and optimistic. Pages decompile concurrently; markdown streams out immediately with placeholders; a pool of tesseract workers fills them in place. Whole-page scans are split along their own ink into chunks so the pool works in parallel.
• Private by construction. pdf.js and tesseract.js run in web workers in the user's tab. Nothing is uploaded.
• Same engine in Node. pdffr/node runs the identical pipeline on the server or the command line, with @napi-rs/canvas standing in for the DOM.

Install

npm install pdffr pdfjs-dist tesseract.js

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.