Flattening and encrypting both leave the original in place, which matters when a step goes wrong halfway through a pipeline. The signing side is part of the same connection, so a rendered invoice can go out for signature without leaving the conversation.
PDFGate's own server, covering three stages of a document's life: rendering it, working on it, and getting it signed. Documents are stored on PDFGate and referenced by ID, so each operation takes the last one's output without files moving through the conversation.
- A PDF rendered from a live URL or from raw HTML, with your own CSS and JavaScript, headers and footers, margins, orientation, page size, background printing, print or screen media emulation, and an option to wait for the network to go idle first
- Existing PDFs brought in from a local path or a URL, fetched back by ID with their metadata, and deleted when finished with
- Form field values extracted from a fillable PDF as a plain name-to-value object
- An interactive PDF flattened to a static one — as a new document, leaving the original alone
- Compression that shrinks the file without changing what it looks like, with linearisation on request
- Password encryption with permissions: copying, printing and editing disabled individually, and separate user and owner passwords
- Text or image watermarks positioned, rotated, sized, coloured and set to an opacity you choose
- E-signature envelopes built from stored documents, sent as OTP-protected links that expire after 30 days, and tracked per recipient and per document
- Webhook subscriptions created with a signing secret returned once, so incoming events can be verified, and deleted when the endpoint goes away
A PDFGate account and a key whose prefix picks the environment: live_ for production, test_ for the sandbox. Two ways in — over stdio from npm as @pdfgate/mcp-server with PDFGATE_API_KEY set, or the hosted server at https://mcp.pdfgate.com/server, which takes either OAuth in the browser with no key to store, or the key in an X-API-KEY header. Receiving webhook events locally means exposing port 3599 to the internet and registering that public URL.
One command plus a key — npx -y @pdfgate/mcp-server, then supply credentials