Imprint PDF

What Imprint PDF MCP server does

The Imprint PDF MCP server gives an MCP-compatible agent access to Imprint’s document generation workflow. Markdown is the input, and the result is a PDF intended for print or formal document delivery. The renderer is designed for Chinese publishing conventions, including first-line indentation, punctuation line-breaking rules, mixed Chinese and English text, and controls for widows and orphans.

Generated documents can include a cover and table of contents when frontmatter provides fields such as title, author, and date. The project also supports tables that repeat their headers across pages, code blocks that avoid being split, vector-rendered Mermaid diagrams, and vector-rendered mathematical formulas. PDF/UA accessibility tagging is enabled by default according to the README.

How it works

Install the optional MCP package, then start the stdio entry point with imprint-mcp. An MCP client launches that process and calls the exposed tools. The agent can submit Markdown for rendering, request available themes, validate a PDF, or create a new document from a template.

The renderer includes 24 themes, such as academic, minimal, ink, gongwen, and ieee. A theme can be selected explicitly, or Imprint can recommend one based on document signals when no theme is specified. Templates cover reports, books, resumes, technical documents, letters, academic papers, Chinese official documents, and IEEE-style papers.

After generation, Imprint runs checks and reports a score from 0 to 100 with itemized evidence. Checks described by the project include text selectability, embedded font subsets, metadata, punctuation rules, table-of-contents page numbers, page numbers, PDF/UA tags, contrast, missing glyphs, content overflow, and image resolution.

Setup and configuration

Install the MCP extra with:

pip install "imprint-pdf[mcp]"
imprint-mcp

The server uses stdio, so the MCP client configuration must start imprint-mcp as a local process. No environment variables or remote service credentials are documented. The base package can also be installed with pip install imprint-pdf; chart rendering is available through the optional charts extra. The command-line package is additionally distributed through npm, including the npx imprint-pdf command.

Tools and capabilities

The Imprint PDF MCP server exposes these documented tools:

• render_markdown converts Markdown into a PDF.
• list_themes returns the available visual themes.
• validate_pdf runs the PDF quality checks.
• new_document creates a document from a built-in template.

The underlying renderer supports theme selection, automatic theme recommendations, image compression, syntax highlighting through Pygments, Mermaid diagrams, mathematical notation, and custom themes represented as JSON files. Academic templates can use two-column layouts, while the gongwen and ieee templates target Chinese official documents and IEEE-style English papers respectively.

Limitations and notes

The README documents a local stdio server, not a hosted HTTP endpoint. Chart support is optional, and Mermaid rendering falls back to a code block when its rendering engine is unavailable. Font availability is checked on the machine that performs rendering; missing fonts produce a warning rather than being supplied by the MCP server.

The project’s online demo is separate from the MCP server and is rate-limited to 20 uses per hour per IP. The README names Claude Code and Cursor as MCP clients for the stdio server. Other client compatibility is not specifically described in the project material.