Local PDF Agent

An MCP server that answers questions about PDF files with citations using Claude AI.

Setup

Create a .env file with the following content:

ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your-api-key-here
PDF_FOLDER_PATH=/path/to/your/pdf/folder

Starting the MCP Server

Configure MCP server:

Add the following configuration to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "LocalPDFAgent": {
      "command": "/path/to/uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "/path/to/local-pdf-agent",
        "run",
        "--env-file",
        ".env",
        "mcp",
        "run",
        "tool.py"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Start the dev server:

uv run --env-file .env mcp dev tool.py

To start the MCP server, add the configuration to your claude_desktop_config.json file and then run the server using the provided command. Once the server is running, you can send questions from Claude.

Workflow Design

graph TD
    A[Question Input] --> B[Search PDF Files]
    B --> C{PDFs Found?}
    C -->|No| D[Return Error]
    C -->|Yes| E[Evaluate Filename Relevance]
    E --> F[Sort PDFs by Relevance]
    F --> G[Read PDF File]
    G --> H[Generate Answer with Claude AI]
    H --> I[Evaluate Answer]
    I --> J{Score > Best Score?}
    J -->|Yes| K[Update Best Answer]
    J -->|No| L{More PDFs?}
    K --> L
    L -->|Yes| G
    L -->|No| M[Return Best Answer]

The workflow operates in the following steps:

1. Receive a question from the user
2. Search for PDF files in the specified folder
3. Evaluate relevance between filenames and the question
4. Process PDFs in order of relevance:
   • Read PDF file content
   • Generate answer using Claude AI
   • Evaluate answer quality
   • Update if a better answer is found
5. Return the highest quality answer

Usage

Once the MCP server is running, you can ask questions through Claude.

The server will return:

• Answer with citations
• Answer evaluation (quality score, reasoning, potential improvements)
• Source PDF file path

Citations are displayed in the format: [Citation: cited text (Document Name(index))]