anymd MCP Server

<div align="center"> <img src="docs/public/og-image.png" alt="anymd — any file → clean Markdown for AI agents" width="820" /> <h1 hidden>anymd</h1> <!-- generated:lead -->

PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, EPUB, HTML and web pages, images (OCR), audio and video (metadata, subtitles, transcripts). A fast Rust MCP server and CLI that runs on your machine. No API key.

<!-- /generated:lead -->

<!-- repomap:agent-ready -->[](https://github.com/SylphxAI/repomap#agent-readiness-score)<!-- /repomap:agent-ready -->

Install · Benchmarks · Tools · CLI · Formats · Docs

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_{Formerly pdf-reader-mcp. Migrating from pdf-reader-mcp}

<!-- /generated:formerly --> <img src="docs/public/demo.gif" alt="Real terminal session: anymd converts a PDF page with its table, searches a folder, reads a spreadsheet, then Claude Code answers from the PDF through the anymd MCP server" width="820" />

_{A real, unedited terminal recording (asciinema + agg, <a href="bench/demo">script</a>). The last command is Claude Code answering from the PDF through the anymd MCP server.}

</div>

Why anymd

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• Fast. Native Rust converts in parallel, page by page. On the 19 benchmark documents every tool converted, anymd takes 12.1 s in total; docling 1,723.3 s (143×), markitdown 45.4 s (4×), marker 5,256.3 s (435×).

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• 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 and transcripts use local tools you already have (tesseract, ffmpeg, whisper.cpp), and only when they are installed.

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.

<details open> <summary><b>Claude Code</b></summary>

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

Or as a plugin, with the anymd skill: /plugin marketplace add SylphxAI/anymd, then /plugin install anymd@anymd.

</details> <details> <summary><b>Codex</b></summary>

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

or in ~/.codex/config.toml:

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

</details> <details> <summary><b>Cursor</b></summary>

or in .cursor/mcp.json:

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

</details> <details> <summary><b>VS Code</b></summary>

Install in VS Code with one click, or from a terminal:

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

or in .vscode/mcp.json:

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

</details> <details> <summary><b>Claude Desktop</b></summary>

One click: download anymd-<version>.mcpb from the latest release and open it. Or, by hand:

Add to claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config):

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

</details> <details> <summary><b>Windsurf, Zed, Cline, and other clients</b></summary>

Any client that speaks MCP over stdio: command npx, args ["-y", "@sylphx/anymd"]. To keep the server inside one folder, add --allow-dir=/path/to/docs.

</details> <details> <summary><b>CLI only</b></summary>

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

Python: uvx anymd report.pdf > report.md runs it once, pip install anymd installs it, and uvx anymd mcp starts the MCP server. The wheels carry the same prebuilt binary.

Docker (amd64 and arm64):

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

Or build it from crates.io (needs a Rust 1.92+ toolchain; OCR and transcripts still use tesseract/ffmpeg when installed):

cargo install anymd

npm, pip and Docker ship a prebuilt binary, while cargo install compiles one on your machine.

</details>

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):

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	anymd	docling	kreuzberg	unstructured	markitdown	marker	pdftotext
Overall score	96.3	93.0	81.7	81.2	76.8	71.0	42.2
Table cells F1	92.2	89.9	38.4	38.4	57.2	60.9	0.0
Reading order	98.8	94.4	96.8	93.9	85.5	76.8	52.0
Docs converted	38/38	38/38	38/38	38/38	38/38	30/38	23/38
Time, all docs	22.9 s	2,432.4 s	16.0 s	346.5 s	75.6 s	7,104.5 s	0.90 s

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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.

MCP tools

anymd exposes three tools.

Tool	Use it to	Key arguments
read	Turn a file, URL, or folder into Markdown	source, pages ("1-5,8"), max_tokens (default 20000), cursor, ocr, images (refs · none), transcript, download_whisper_model
search	Find text across files, folders, and URLs	query, sources, mode (auto · literal · ranked), glob, max_results
inspect	Go deeper on a PDF	operation: render_page, extract_regions, ocr_pages, structure (JSON with geometry), compare, inspect

A read answer looks like this:

---
source: papers/attention.pdf
title: Attention Is All You Need
pages: 15
showing: 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 file
anymd deck.pptx notes.docx budget.xlsx        # several files, each with a header
anymd https://example.com/article            # a web page (main content only)
cat scan.png | anymd - --ocr                 # stdin, with OCR
anymd paper.pdf --pages 1-3 --max-tokens 4000
anymd 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

Input	What you get
PDF	Reading-order Markdown: headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, sub/superscripts, <!-- page N --> markers, bookmarks as an outline. Running headers and page numbers are removed. Image-only pages are OCR'd when tesseract is installed. Embedded figures are saved to the anymd cache and marked in place with their caption (images: "refs", the default).
Word .docx	Headings, bold/italic, links, nested lists, tables with merged cells, footnotes, equations as LaTeX, embedded pictures as image files
PowerPoint .pptx	One section per slide in deck order, titles, bullets, tables, chart data, speaker notes, pictures as image files
Excel .xlsx .xls .ods · CSV/TSV	One table per sheet, dates as ISO strings, capped at 2,000 rows per sheet
EPUB	One section per chapter in spine order, plus title and author; pictures as image files
HTML and URLs	The main article only: navigation, cookie banners, and sidebars are dropped. Relative links are resolved, and code keeps its language.
Markdown, text, JSON	Returned unchanged, with pagination
Images	Dimensions and EXIF (camera, date, GPS), plus OCR text when tesseract is installed
Audio / video	Duration, streams, chapters, embedded and sidecar subtitles (via ffprobe/ffmpeg). Local whisper.cpp transcript with transcript: true; download_whisper_model: true fetches a verified model on first use.

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.

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, whisper.cpp) 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

<!-- generated:also-from -->

• 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.

<!-- /generated:also-from -->

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

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License

MIT © Sylphx