Illustrator MCP Server

Illustrator MCP Server

An MCP server that drives Adobe Illustrator: documents, artboards, layers, shapes and paths, text, colour, pathfinder operations and export. It runs on the machine where Illustrator is installed and talks to it through ExtendScript, the scripting interface Illustrator ships with.

Requires Illustrator 2023 or later on macOS or Windows, and Node.js 18 or later.

Install

Claude Code:

claude mcp add illustrator -- npx -y adobe-mcp-illustrator

Any client that reads an mcpServers block (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Warp, …):

{  "mcpServers": {    "illustrator": {      "command": "npx",      "args": ["-y", "adobe-mcp-illustrator"]    }  }}

On macOS the first call asks for permission to control Illustrator (System Settings > Privacy & Security > Automation).

Conventions

• Positions and sizes are points (72 pt = 1 in), measured from the top-left corner of an artboard (artboardIndex, default 0), with y increasing downward. Illustrator's own document coordinates run upward; the server converts both ways and accounts for large-canvas documents.
• Items are chosen with target: { ids: [...] }, { names: [...] } or { selection: true }. Ids are Illustrator's own item ids (PageItem.uuid); they come from list_items and from every tool that creates artwork.
• Colours are a swatch name, "#RRGGBB", "rgb(r,g,b)", "cmyk(c,m,y,k)", "gray(g)" or "none". A document's colour mode is fixed when it is created, so create_document asks for it.
• Fonts are PostScript names; list_fonts finds them.
• Files must be inside your home folder or a directory in ILLUSTRATOR_ALLOWED_DIRS.

Tools

help({ tool }) describes any tool's parameters.

How it stays out of your way

• No dialogs. Every script switches Illustrator's alerts off while it runs and restores your setting afterwards, even when the script fails, so a warning cannot leave a call waiting.
• Your settings come back. The coordinate system a script uses is set for that script and restored afterwards.
• Timeouts say why. If Illustrator does not answer within ILLUSTRATOR_SCRIPT_TIMEOUT_MS (default 120 s), the error says a dialog is probably open in Illustrator.
• Menu commands are checked. Illustrator ignores a menu command name it does not know and reports nothing for one it does. execute_menu_command accepts only the 859 known names (unless you pass allowUnknown) and returns the selection and document state after the command, so you can see what it did.
• Live Effects and preferences come from published practice. Adobe does not document the LiveEffect XML that apply_effect and pathfinder pass to applyEffect, nor the preference keys behind set_preferences; the server uses only parameters and keys that published scripts rely on, recorded with their sources in the capability atlas. pathfinder can fall back to Illustrator's menu commands with method: "menu". The Photoshop effects (Effect Gallery, Artistic, Sketch, Texture and the rest) are not offered: each command opens a dialog, and their LiveEffect parameters are stored as encoded binary that no published script sets. NTSC Colors, which has no dialog, is the exception.
• Commands through a temporary Action. The object model cannot set a blend's steps or orientation, run Simplify, make a Pathfinder compound shape or flatten transparency, so make_blend, set_blend_options, simplify_path, compound_shape and flatten_transparency write a one-step Action, play it with its dialog closed and unload it again. The Action parameters are the ones published scripts and recorded action sets use.
• Dialogs done by script. Average, Clean Up, Split Into Grid, Transform Each, Batch and several Edit Colors commands open a dialog, so the server does what each dialog describes through the object model instead. Smooth and Offset Path have no such route and are not offered (apply_effect with offset_path and expand covers Offset Path).
• Actions edited as files. Illustrator can play, load and unload an action but cannot list or change a loaded one. list_actions reads the sets from Illustrator's preferences, as AiCommandPalette does, and load_actions and create_action_set make their changes to the .aia file before loading it. run_batch does what the Batch dialog does, one call per file, so a long batch does not time out.
• Data sets from records. Illustrator captures a data set from the artwork as it is, so create_data_sets sets each record's values on the bound objects and then captures it, the way published variable scripts do.
• No raw input in scripts. Every value a caller passes is validated and written into the script as a literal.

Configuration

Development

npm test         # definitions, argument parsing, protocol, and the static script auditnpm run audit    # the audit alone, with findings listednpm run check    # syntax check

The static audit runs every tool with sample arguments against a stubbed Illustrator and checks that each generated script parses as ES5 and uses only names in Illustrator's scripting object model (2022 to 2025). It does not run anything in Illustrator: a tool that passes it has not necessarily been run against the application.

Shared infrastructure (script escaping, the executor, the server shell, the audit) comes from adobe-mcp-core, the foundation shared with adobe-mcp-indesign.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE and NOTICE for the menu command data.