Use DiemDesk inside Claude
Say “convert this to PDF” and it happens — to a real file, on your own machine, without opening a browser. Two minutes to set up.
What it looks like
You: Turn the invoice on my desktop into a PDF and make it searchable.
Claude: Converted invoice.docx to invoice.pdf, then ran OCR. The text layer is in; you can search it now.
No upload dialog, no tab switch. It reads the file from your disk and writes the result back beside it.
Set it up
You need Node.js 18 or newer. Nothing else is installed permanently — npx fetches the server when Claude starts it.
Open your config file
The file may not exist yet. If it does not, create it — the folder is already there.
| Claude Desktop · macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json |
| Claude Desktop · Windows | %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json |
| Claude Code | .mcp.json, in your project folder |
In Claude Desktop you can also reach it from Settings → Developer → Edit config, which opens the right file for you.
Paste this in
If the file already has an mcpServers block, add just the "diemdesk" entry inside it rather than replacing the whole thing.
{
"mcpServers": {
"diemdesk": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "diemdesk-mcp"]
}
}
}Prefer a terminal? In Claude Code this one line does the same job:
claude mcp add diemdesk -- npx -y diemdesk-mcpRestart Claude — fully
The config is read once at startup. Closing the window is not enough: quit the application properly (Cmd + Q on a Mac, or right-click the tray icon on Windows) and open it again.
Check it worked
Ask it: “What DiemDesk tools do you have?” It should list nine. In Claude Desktop they also appear under the tools icon in the message box.
Then try the real thing, with a file you actually have:
Optional — connect your account
Everything above works with no account at all, at the free daily allowance. Connecting lifts the cap and unlocks OCR.
Go to your account and press Connect Claude. It gives you a finished command with the token already in it — copy, paste, restart. There is nothing to fill in by hand and nothing to find in a developer console.
For reference, that is all it changes — an env block:
{
"mcpServers": {
"diemdesk": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "diemdesk-mcp"],
"env": {
"DIEMDESK_TOKEN": "ddm_your-token-here"
}
}
}
}The token does not expire, so it will not quietly stop working. It stays valid until you revoke it, which you can do from the same place at any time.
The nine tools
| office_to_pdf | Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, RTF, CSV or HTML → PDF |
| pdf_to_word | PDF → editable .docx |
| pdf_to_powerpoint | PDF → editable .pptx |
| pdf_to_rtf | PDF → rich text |
| pdf_to_odt | PDF → OpenDocument text |
| pdf_to_pdfa | PDF → PDF/A, the archival format |
| ocr_pdf | Scanned PDF → searchable, plus the recognised text |
| webpage_to_pdf | A live URL → PDF |
| list_local_tools | Asks what is deliberately NOT here, and why |
You never type these names. Ask for what you want in your own words and the assistant picks the right one.
Why nine and not a hundred
Most tools cannot be here, and that is the point
Merge, split, compress, redact, sign, bank statement to Excel and about a hundred others run inside your browser. The file never reaches us. An MCP server has no way to touch those, and building server copies purely to lengthen this list would mean uploading files that currently never move.
These nine already ran on our servers
Office conversions, OCR and webpage capture genuinely cannot run in a browser, and never could. Exposing them here changes nothing about where your file goes — same tier, same labelling, deleted immediately after the job.
list_local_tools and it will tell you which jobs to do at diemdesk.com instead, where nothing is uploaded at all.If something goes wrong
- Claude does not show the tools
- Restart it completely — Claude Desktop reads the config once at startup, so a reload is not enough. On a Mac, quit from the menu bar rather than closing the window. If they still do not appear, the config file almost certainly has a JSON syntax error: a trailing comma or a missing brace stops the whole file being read, silently.
- "npx: command not found"
- Node.js is not installed, or not on the PATH your assistant sees. Install Node 18 or newer from nodejs.org and restart. On a Mac, if you installed Node through Homebrew, you may need the full path to npx — run "which npx" in a terminal and use that instead of "npx" in the config.
- It says a tool needs Pro
- OCR is a Pro tool. Add your token to the config as shown above. The conversions work on the free daily allowance without one.
- It converted the file but I cannot find it
- Results are written next to the input file, with the same name and a new extension. Ask for a specific location and it will use that instead — "convert ~/Desktop/report.docx to PDF and put it in ~/Documents".
Questions
- What is MCP, in plain terms?
- A standard way for an AI assistant to use outside tools. Without it, Claude can talk about your PDF but cannot do anything to it. With this installed, you can say "convert this to PDF" and it actually happens, on your own machine, to a real file.
- Why nine tools and not 114?
- Because almost everything DiemDesk does runs inside your browser — the file is opened and rebuilt on your own machine and never reaches us. An MCP server cannot reach those tools, and we are not going to build server copies just to have a longer list, because that would mean uploading files that currently never move. What you get here is exactly the set that already ran on our servers.
- Why are the AI tools not included?
- Summarise, chat and translate exist to bring AI to people on our website. Inside an assistant they are circular — you would be asking Claude to ask us to do something Claude already does. The tools here are the ones an assistant genuinely cannot do on its own.
- So what happens to a file I pass it?
- These are the server-side tools, so the file does go to our server, is converted, and is deleted immediately afterwards. Same tier as the Office conversions on the website, labelled the same way. If that is not what you want for a particular document, use the in-browser tool on diemdesk.com — ask the assistant to run list_local_tools and it will tell you which those are.
- Does it work with anything other than Claude?
- Yes. It speaks the Model Context Protocol over stdio with no dependencies, so any MCP-capable client can run it.