PDF Triage MCP server

pdf-triage-mcp

An MCP server that lets any AI tool read local PDFs — without uploading them, without an OCR bill, and without silently handing back garbage.

Built on @firecrawl/pdf-inspector (Rust, no ML models, no external services).

┌─ pdf_classify ──→  text_based · 0.98 · 12 pages · 0 need OCR   ~20ms
├─ pdf_search  ──→  "invoice total" found on p4, p9              ~150ms
├─ pdf_extract ──→  clean Markdown, truncated to your budget     ~150ms
└─ pdf_tables  ──→  just the pipe tables, no prose               ~150ms

Table of contents

• Why this exists
• Install
• Connect it to your AI tool — 12 clients
• Tools
• Configuration
• Engine fallback
• Known limitations
• Development

Why this exists

Most PDF tooling has the same failure mode: it returns confident text regardless of whether extraction actually worked. Broken CID fonts, substitution-cipher encodings, scanned pages with no text layer — you get plausible-looking output and find out downstream, if at all.

pdf-inspector is unusually good at knowing when it failed. It emits U+FFFD rather than guessing at an unmapped CID, runs substitution-cipher detection over its own output, and reclassifies a document as scanned when extracted text drops below 50% alphanumeric. But it stops at reporting those findings on a result object — and most wrappers throw them away.

This server acts on them. Every response carries the trust signals, above the content, where the model reads them first:

> [!WARNING] ENCODING ISSUES DETECTED. The text layer decoded to suspicious
> output — typically a garbled CID font or a substitution-cipher encoding
> where letter frequencies match natural language but the letters themselves
> are wrong. Treat all extracted text here as unreliable and prefer OCR.

---

# Quarterly Report
...

Three design rules follow:

1. Classify before extracting. pdf_classify costs ~20ms and tells you whether extraction is worth attempting at all.
2. Bound every output. A 300-page PDF is easily 500k tokens. Everything truncates by default and tells you how to page through instead.
3. Confine every path. A model that has just read an untrusted document must not be talkable into reading ~/.ssh/id_rsa. Enforced in code, not left to the model's judgement.

Install

Nothing to install. Every config below runs the published package straight from npm:

npx -y pdf-triage-mcp --root /path/to/your/documents

Your MCP client runs that for you — you only need to paste the config. Confirm it works first:

npx -y pdf-triage-mcp --version

Requires Node 20+. Available on npm as pdf-triage-mcp and in the MCP Registry as io.github.vishalmeena2211/pdf-triage-mcp.

From source instead (for development)

git clone https://github.com/vishalmeena2211/pdf-triage-mcp.git
cd pdf-triage-mcp
npm install
npm run build
node dist/index.js --root ~/Documents

Then substitute "command": "node", "args": ["/absolute/path/to/dist/index.js", ...] for the npx invocation in any config below.

Connect it to your AI tool

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.