PDF Reader MCP

npx -y @sylphx/anymd setup              # add anymd to every MCP client on this machinenpx -y @sylphx/anymd report.pdf > report.md   # or convert from the shell

Why anymd

• Fast. Native Rust converts in parallel, page by page. On the 38 benchmark documents, anymd takes 11.5 s in total; docling 2,432.4 s (212×), markitdown 75.6 s (7×); marker converted 30 of them in 7,104.5 s, against anymd's 4.64 s on the same 30 (1,532×).

• Accurate. A layout engine rebuilds words from glyph gaps, puts two-column papers in reading order, and recovers tables, including borderless ones. The text stays exactly as printed, with no glued words and no scrambled columns.
• Lean on tokens. Pages come back as Markdown with <!-- page 3 --> citation anchors, a small front-matter header, and compact tables. A token budget and a cursor keep large documents within your agent's context.
• Every format, one call. One tool reads every format listed below. It also accepts web URLs and whole directories, and search looks across all of them.
• Local and private. Nothing is uploaded. OCR uses installed local doc-VLM models or tesseract; transcripts use ffmpeg and bundled Qwen3-ASR. OCR setup and ASR model downloads require explicit opt-in.

Install

Add anymd to every MCP client on your machine (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, Claude Desktop, Windsurf, Gemini CLI) with one command:

npx -y @sylphx/anymd setup     # --dry-run to preview, --remove to undo

Or add it by hand: every MCP client runs the same command, npx -y @sylphx/anymd. Node 18+ is the only requirement; npm installs the native binary for your platform.

claude mcp add anymd -- npx -y @sylphx/anymd

codex mcp add anymd -- npx -y @sylphx/anymd

[mcp_servers.anymd]command = "npx"args = ["-y", "@sylphx/anymd"]

{ "mcpServers": { "anymd": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@sylphx/anymd"] } } }

code --add-mcp '{"name":"anymd","command":"npx","args":["-y","@sylphx/anymd"]}'

{ "servers": { "anymd": { "type": "stdio", "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@sylphx/anymd"] } } }

{ "mcpServers": { "anymd": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@sylphx/anymd"] } } }

npm install -g @sylphx/anymd     # or run it once with: npx -y @sylphx/anymd <file>

brew install sylphxai/tap/anymd

docker run --rm -v "$PWD:/data" ghcr.io/sylphxai/anymd report.pdf > report.mddocker run -i --rm ghcr.io/sylphxai/anymd        # MCP server on stdio

cargo install anymd

Benchmarks

AgentDocBench is an open benchmark for document → Markdown conversion for agents: license-clean documents in 12 categories (math papers, two-column papers, financial tables, forms, scans, CJK, slides, spreadsheets, Word, EPUB, HTML), scored on verbatim sentences, text F1, reading order, and table cells, with time and output tokens. Every tool runs on the same kind of GitHub-hosted runner (4 CPUs):

The generated leaderboard, per-category scores (including where anymd loses), and method are in the benchmark guide. The corpus, ground truth, adapters, and raw results are in bench/, and the Benchmark workflow reruns everything; new tools can join with a single adapter file.

Image and video extraction

Image and video benchmarks cover page-image OCR and embedded video subtitles separately:

The image score is historical, not a score for the current OCR model. The video scores were measured on 2026-10-08 using small authored regression datasets, not films or lectures; anymd drops a repeated caption at a different timestamp. They measure embedded subtitle extraction, not visual understanding or ASR. The guide links the alternative selection, limitations, timings, raw outputs and reproduction harness.

MCP tools

anymd exposes four tools.

A read answer looks like this:

---source: papers/attention.pdftitle: Attention Is All You Needpages: 15showing: pages 1-9---
<!-- page 1 -->
# Attention Is All You Need…
<!-- page 8 -->
|Model|BLEU EN-DE|BLEU EN-FR||-|-|-||Transformer (big)|28.4|41.8|…
<!-- Stopped at the 20000-token budget. Continue with cursor: "10", or pick pages, or raise max_tokens. -->

search answers with one line per hit:

5 matches for "masked language model" (2 files, 31 sections searched)
### papers/bert.pdf (5)- p.1: …by using a “**masked language model**” (MLM) pre-training objective, inspired by the Cloze task…- p.2: …In addition to the **masked language model**, we also use a “next sentence prediction” task…

If nothing matches exactly, search falls back to BM25-ranked passages, so a question like "how does bidirectional pretraining work" still finds the right page.

CLI

The same binary is a command-line converter, like MarkItDown but much faster:

anymd report.pdf > report.md                 # a fileanymd deck.pptx notes.docx budget.xlsx        # several files, each with a headeranymd https://example.com/article            # a web page (main content only)cat scan.png | anymd - --ocr                 # stdin, with OCRanymd setup ocr                             # one-time: install the OCR engine and pinned local models (~2 GB)anymd scan.png --ocr vlm                    # tables as Markdown, formulas as LaTeXanymd paper.pdf --pages 1-3 --max-tokens 4000anymd search "indemnification" contracts/ --glob '*.pdf'anymd doctor                                 # lists the optional tools anymd found

Run with no arguments from an MCP client (piped stdin), or as anymd mcp, and it serves MCP over stdio.

Formats

How it works

For PDFs, anymd reads glyph positions rather than text runs. Glyphs are grouped into lines by baseline, which tolerates super- and subscripts. Word spaces come from the gaps between glyphs, measured against the font size and adjusted for letter tracking. A column-aware XY cut finds gutters between running text. Tables come from drawn lines where a table has them (a missing line between two cells makes a merged cell) and from aligned columns of whitespace where it does not. Wrapped cell text stays in its cell, stacked header lines become one header, and a header over several columns is kept with each of them. Text a reader cannot see (invisible text, or text in the colour of the box behind it) is left out. Pages are processed in parallel and isolated from each other, so one malformed page never fails the whole document. The other formats are parsed natively in Rust (zip/XML, calamine, html5ever); no Python, LibreOffice, or cloud service is involved.

anymd Pro

The anymd core is free and open source (MIT), and nothing that was free has moved to Pro. anymd Pro (current one-time price, from 8.4.0) adds exactly two things for agents that must show their evidence: video timelines with exact, hashed frames (inspect video_timeline and render_frame, and the timeline option of read and outline) and cite-check, which verifies a quote at a page and location in a PDF. Licences are checked offline; no account. Pro funds anymd's development. Buy anymd Pro for instant delivery after payment: copy your licence token from the checkout confirmation page, or recover it through the product's recovery page. Buy from the terminal: anymd pro buy opens the checkout in your browser and turns the payment into a licence token on this machine, so there is nothing to copy. See anymd Pro.

Local and hosted

anymd has two modes, and only one of them runs on your machine:

• Local (free, MIT, this repository). The anymd binary, the MCP server, the CLI and the anymd-core, anymd-pdf and anymd-formats crates. It converts on your machine, uploads nothing, and needs no API key.
• Hosted (Sylphx AI parse, metered). The same crates, pinned at the published version and imported unchanged, serve document parsing for Sylphx AI callers that do not want a local runtime. The call is billed per page and needs a Sylphx AI account. This is the paid mode; there is no licence key and nothing in the local binary is gated by it.

Sylphx AI parse is not a different parser and not a fork: the hosted service imports these crates, so a fix here reaches both modes and the two never drift into separate engines. Only the free local binary lives in this repository; the hosted service lives in the Sylphx platform.

For importers, the anymd-core, anymd-pdf and anymd-formats crate APIs are stable within a major version: no breaking change ships without a major version bump, so the service's pinned version keeps working and is moved forward deliberately, never forced by a patch or minor release.

Security

• Local-first: documents never leave your machine unless you pass a URL, and even then only that URL is fetched.
• URL fetches block private and loopback addresses, and every redirect hop is checked again, pinned to its resolved address.
• --allow-dir=<path> (repeatable) or MCP_PDF_ALLOWED_DIRS confines the server to the directories you list.
• Embedded images are written only to anymd's own cache directory (ANYMD_CACHE_DIR, else the platform cache), never next to the source document, and refused over 50 megapixels.
• External tools (tesseract, ffprobe, ffmpeg) are optional. anymd runs them without a shell, with a timeout and an output cap.

See SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability.

Also from Sylphx

• repomap: A map of your codebase for AI agents: code graph, search, call paths and change impact.
• lockdocs: Exact-version library docs from your lockfile. Local, offline, no rate limits.
• skills: Battle-tested agent skills for Claude Code and Codex, installed in one command.
• readme-mark: Beautiful README images from one URL: banners, badges, icons and stats cards.
• Sylphx apps: Apps and tools from Sylphx.

More from Sylphx: https://sylphx.com/open-source

Star history

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License

MIT © Sylphx