LABSCO SUMMARY

Merge and extract, with a caution flag.

The merge and page-extract operations are the solid core; the pattern-matching "find related PDFs" is the interesting one, pulling in documents whose text matches a regex from a starting file. Two honesty notes straight from the README: it is marked work-in-progress, and its own author says filesystem or Everything search beats its search — so use this for the manipulation, not as a file finder.

What it is

An MCP server that gives a model a handful of PDF manipulation operations — merging files, extracting pages, and locating related PDFs by matching extracted text against a regex. The README's own header marks it work-in-progress and to be used with caution, on Windows.

What you get

Several PDFs merged into one, in default or a specified order
Specific pages extracted from a PDF
Related PDFs found — and optionally merged — by matching text against a regex pattern from a target PDF

Requirements

No account and no key. Install is a clone, then uv venv, activate, and uv pip install -e .; Claude Desktop launches it with uv --directory <YOUR_PATH_TO_MCP_PDF_TOOLS> run pdf-tools. The pyproject names the package mcp-pdf-tools at 0.1.0. The README labels the project work-in-progress and says its own search is weaker than a filesystem or Everything search — reach for those first when you just need to locate a file.

Setup effort

Build from source — get the source, then follow the steps on this page and add the configuration for your client

See installation options

USE CASES

01

Combining several PDFs into one

Merge the files, in the order you specify when order matters.

02

Pulling a few pages out of a large PDF

Extract the specific pages you need into a new file.

03

Gathering PDFs that share content

Match text from a target PDF against others by regex to find the related ones, and merge them if you want.

BEFORE YOU INSTALL

What to know first

Requires

uv on PATH

Where it runs

The documented client runs the server on your machine.

INSTALLATION

Connect your client

Get the source, then follow the steps on this page and add the configuration for your client. This one is built from source rather than installed with a single command.

Server setup

From source

TERMINAL

git clone https://github.com/hanweg/mcp-pdf-tools
cd mcp-pdf-tools

# Create and activate virtual environment
uv venv
.venv\Scripts\activate

# Install the package
uv pip install -e .

uv

TERMINAL

uv --directory <YOUR_PATH_TO_MCP_PDF_TOOLS> run pdf-tools

MCP Clients

Any MCP client

ANY MCP CLIENT · JSON

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdf-tools": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "<YOUR_PATH_TO_MCP_PDF_TOOLS>",
        "run",
        "pdf-tools"
      ]
    }
  }
}

PDF Tools