v0.1.0 — first release

First published release. BensPDF gives an AI assistant a set of PDF tools that
run on your own machine, over the Model Context Protocol.

Tools

• pdf_page_count — how many pages, reading only the page tree so it stays cheap on long documents
• pdf_metadata — title, author, dates, producer, keeping the Info dictionary and the XMP packet separate so you can see where they disagree
• pdf_check_text — whether a file is readable text or a scan that needs OCR
• pdf_page_layout — page sizes, orientation, rotation and print boxes, grouped by shape rather than listed per page
• pdf_check_access — encryption, and what the file asks viewers to permit
• pdf_render_pages — pages as images, for when appearance is the content: handwriting, signatures, charts, checkbox state

Results that produce files land in a scratch workspace and come back as ids, so
steps chain. export is the only tool that writes into your folders. list_artifacts
and discard manage what's in the workspace, and create_test_pdf_file gives you
something to try the tools on.

Install

Install uv, then point
your MCP client at uvx benspdf-mcp. Config blocks for Claude Desktop, VS Code,
Kiro, Cursor and the Codex clients are in the README.

Not in this release

Extracting and editing. There's no text extraction, no OCR, and no split, merge or
rotate. pdf_check_text will tell you a document's text is extractable; getting it
out is the next thing to land.

Privacy

Your PDFs are read locally and never uploaded. With a hosted model your questions
still reach that model — pair the tools with a local Ollama model through the
bundled benspdf-cli and nothing leaves the machine.

Alpha. Tool names and result shapes may still change.