AI Console and MCP server

The AI Console

The AI Console is a chat panel inside Pdf Editor. Open it from the ✨ AI button next to the 💬 Feedback button (bottom-left), or from the Window menu. Type what you want in plain language; the answer is applied to the document in front of you and every change is undoable.

Ask it to "find every price and highlight it", "rewrite the second paragraph on page 3 in plain English" or "add a Confidential stamp to all pages". Whatever a connected assistant can do, the console can do too, and Undo takes it back.

Choose the assistant

Settings ▸ AI:

• Built-in — the default. No key or account needed.
• Claude (own key) — paste your own Anthropic API key.
• OpenAI (own key) — paste your own OpenAI API key.
• Gemini (own key) — paste your own Google AI key.

With your own key you can also edit the Base prompt, the standing instructions sent with every request — house style, default colours, language, anything you always want applied.

Connect an assistant

1. Install Pdf Editor from the Mac App Store and open it once.
2. Open Help ▸ MCP Server…. Pick your assistant; the window shows a ready-to-paste configuration with the correct path to the app.
3. Paste it into your assistant. From then on the assistant opens Pdf Editor when it needs it.

The configurations below assume the app is in /Applications; copy the exact path from Help ▸ MCP Server….

Claude Code

Run once in a terminal (add --scope user to make it available in every project), or paste the block below into .mcp.json in the project folder.

claude mcp add pdfeditorpro -- "/Applications/Pdf Editor.app/Contents/MacOS/Pdf Editor" --mcp-stdio

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdfeditorpro": {
      "command": "/Applications/Pdf Editor.app/Contents/MacOS/Pdf Editor",
      "args": ["--mcp-stdio"]
    }
  }
}

Then, in a Claude Code session, ask for something and watch Pdf Editor: "open the front document and list what's in it", "add a title in the top-left corner". Claude Code launches Pdf Editor if it is not running.

Claude Desktop

Add the same mcpServers block to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json and restart Claude Desktop. The Pdf Editor tools appear in the tools menu of every chat.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdfeditorpro": {
      "command": "/Applications/Pdf Editor.app/Contents/MacOS/Pdf Editor",
      "args": ["--mcp-stdio"]
    }
  }
}

VS Code and Antigravity

VS Code: add to .vscode/mcp.json in the workspace, or to the user-level file opened by the MCP: Open User Configuration command. Antigravity: paste the mcpServers block above into its MCP configuration file (Settings ▸ MCP Servers ▸ edit the configuration).

{
  "servers": {
    "pdfeditorpro": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "/Applications/Pdf Editor.app/Contents/MacOS/Pdf Editor",
      "args": ["--mcp-stdio"]
    }
  }
}

Codex CLI

Add to ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.pdfeditorpro]
command = "/Applications/Pdf Editor.app/Contents/MacOS/Pdf Editor"
args = ["--mcp-stdio"]

Working through an assistant

A connected assistant works on the document open in the front window: it can read the text, mark it up, correct and restyle text, add notes and stamps, move and extract pages, fill forms, apply watermarks, redact and save. Every change goes through the same undo as your own, so ⌘Z takes it back exactly like one of yours.