PDF Inspector MCP Server (HTTP)

Classify PDFs (text-based vs scanned vs image vs mixed), extract text, and convert to clean Markdown — over a Streamable HTTP MCP transport. Powered by the native @firecrawl/pdf-inspector library (Rust via napi-rs).

No API key. No external API. Pure local compute. Because the server is remote, every tool takes a PDF as either a url (downloaded server-side) or a base64 base64 string — not a local file path.

Tools (6)

Tool	What it does
classify_pdf	Fast classify: TextBased / Scanned / ImageBased / Mixed + confidence + OCR pages
detect_pdf	Fast metadata (type, page count, OCR pages) — no markdown
process_pdf	Full parse: type, text, and Markdown with layout metadata
pdf_to_markdown	Per-page clean Markdown + table/column/OCR layout flags
extract_text	Plain text extraction
extract_text_with_positions	Positioned text items with font / bbox metadata

Each tool accepts { url } or { base64 }. process_pdf, pdf_to_markdown, and extract_text_with_positions also accept an optional pages array (0-indexed) to restrict output.

The classify-before-OCR gate

classify_pdf is the cheap front door for any document pipeline: it decides whether a PDF is real text or a scan in ~tens of milliseconds, so an agent can skip OCR entirely on native PDFs and only fall back to OCR / a vision model on the pages that actually need it (pagesNeedingOcr).

Auth

Dual-mode, matching the AgenticLedger fleet convention for credential-less MCPs. The server stores nothing:

• Bearer passthrough — Authorization: Bearer <any-token>. Any non-empty token is accepted (access control only).
• OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials — POST /oauth/token with client_id=pdf-inspector&client_secret=<any>&grant_type=client_credentials, then use the returned mcp_-prefixed token as the Bearer.

Client config

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdf-inspector": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://pdfinspectormcp.agenticledger.ai/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer pdf" }
    }
  }
}

Hosting note

@firecrawl/pdf-inspector ships prebuilt native binaries as optional dependencies (linux-x64-gnu, darwin-arm64, win32-x64-msvc). Railway's linux-x64 build pulls the linux-x64-gnu prebuilt automatically via npm install — no Rust toolchain / Docker image needed.

Local dev

npm install
npm run build
npm start           # serves on :3100

Deployed to Railway (project FinanceMCPs) from agenticledger/pdf-inspector-mcp-http.