doc2md

Turn any document into clean Markdown — built for AI agents.

doc2md is an MCP server that converts PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, EPUB, HTML, CSV/JSON/XML and scanned files (OCR) into agent-ready Markdown. Pass a public URL or base64 content; no API key, no account, no local dependencies for the agent side.

Most document-conversion MCP servers only run locally over stdio. doc2md is designed to be deployed remotely (Streamable HTTP) so any agent — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Glama Chat, your own pipelines — can hand it a URL and get Markdown back in one call.

Why agents love it

• URL-first — {"url": "https://…/report.pdf"} is all it takes; base64 supported for local files
• Tables survive — PDF tables are extracted as Markdown/CSV/JSON, not flattened into noise
• Pagination built in — large documents return in chunks with a offset continuation hint, so context windows stay healthy
• Scanned? No problem — automatic detection, with a dedicated OCR tool (RapidOCR, offline, no cloud OCR API)
• Cheap inspection first — get_document_info and search_document let agents find the right pages before converting anything
• Safe to expose — SSRF protection (private/loopback/link-local IPs rejected on every redirect hop), 30 MB download cap, password-PDF support

Tools

Plus a summarize_document prompt template for clients that surface MCP prompts.

Quickstart

Hosted (zero install)

One-click deploy your own instance from the doc2md page on Glama ("Deploy Server"), or run the Docker image below, then point any MCP client at the Streamable HTTP endpoint:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "doc2md": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://glama.ai/endpoints/<your-profile>/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop / Cursor (local)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "doc2md": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "git+https://github.com/skyzhao1223/doc2md#egg=doc2md-mcp[ocr]", "doc2md"]
    }
  }
}

Docker

docker build -t doc2md .
docker run --rm -i doc2md                      # stdio
docker run --rm -p 8000:8000 \
  -e DOC2MD_TRANSPORT=streamable-http doc2md   # HTTP endpoint

From source

git clone https://github.com/skyzhao1223/doc2md && cd doc2md
uv sync --extra ocr --extra dev
uv run doc2md          # stdio server
uv run pytest          # test suite

Example session

agent → get_document_info {"url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762"}
      ← {kind: "pdf", page_count: 15, is_scanned: false, toc: [...]}

agent → search_document {"url": "...", "query": "BLEU"}
      ← matches on pages 8, 9, 10 with snippets

agent → read_pdf_pages {"url": "...", "pages": "8-9"}
      ← plain text of exactly those pages

Limits

Self-hosting notes

• Transport: DOC2MD_TRANSPORT=stdio (default) or streamable-http / sse with DOC2MD_HOST / DOC2MD_PORT. Glama hosting wraps stdio automatically.
• OCR is optional: install the ocr extra (or use the Docker image, which includes it). Without OCR, all other tools still work and OCR calls return an actionable error.
• Conversion results are cached in memory (content-hash keyed, 30 min TTL) so paginated reads of the same document don't re-convert. Nothing is written to disk persistently; documents are processed in memory and dropped.

Development

uv sync --extra dev --extra ocr
uv run pytest            # 40+ tests: detection, conversion, tables, split/merge, SSRF, in-process MCP smoke tests

Layout: src/doc2md/{server,convert,tables,pdfops,ocr,fetch,detect,cache}.py.

Security

• SSRF protection: every URL (including each redirect hop) must resolve to public unicast IPs only; file:, ftp: and other schemes are rejected.
• Size caps on downloads, base64 payloads and OCR page counts.
• No persistence: documents live in memory for the duration of a call.
• Runs as a non-root user in the official Docker image.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later — see LICENSE. The AGPL choice is driven by PyMuPDF (used via PyMuPDF4LLM for high-quality PDF → Markdown), which is AGPL itself. If you operate a modified version of this server over a network, you must offer your users its source.

Roadmap

• Formula / LaTeX extraction quality pass
• split_pdf, merge_pdfs utility tools (v0.2.0)
• Image extraction via extract_pdf_images with base64 export (v0.2.0)
• PyPI release (doc2md-mcp)
• Batch/webhook conversion jobs for very large documents