How to let an AI agent see the document page it annotated Leave feedback

Most document tools are write-only: the agent calls them and reports success because the call returned. generate_pages_preview breaks that pattern — it renders pages as PNG images returned inline, with annotations baked in, so a vision-capable model can actually look.

Note

The commands and config snippets on this page are for the .NET build of the server — the only platform available today. Installation and client setup: MCP server for .NET. Other platforms will expose the same tools with their own launch command; everything else on this page applies unchanged.

Highlight the payment clause on page 2, then show me the page.

1. add_annotation writes contract_annotated.pdf.
2. generate_pages_preview on that file with pages: "2" returns the rendered page as an image block.
3. The agent sees where the highlight landed — and if it landed on the wrong paragraph, update_annotation moves it without starting over.

That third step is the difference between “I added a highlight” and “the highlight is on the payment clause”.

• A client that renders image content. Claude Desktop does; a terminal client may only report that an image was returned. The tool behaves the same either way — the images simply may not be displayed.
• A model that can see. The images are only useful to a vision-capable model.
• Patience for big pages. Rendering is the most expensive call this server makes. Ask for pages: "2" or "1-3", not a fifty-page document.

• Locating text before annotating — render first, let the model read the page, then place the annotation with coordinates it derived rather than guessed.
• Showing a reviewer the result in chat, without opening the file.
• Checking a merge — after import_annotations onto a re-flowed draft, a preview shows whether imported notes still sit where they mean to.
• Sanity-checking the licence state — a trial badge is visible in the rendered page, which is a blunt but effective check.

Render pages 1-3 of the annotated contract so I can check the comments. Show me page 2, then tell me whether the highlight covers the whole clause. Preview the first page and describe what is on it.

The rendering happens locally — the PNG is produced by the engine on your machine. But the image then travels to your model provider like any other message content: with a cloud-hosted model, previewing a page means sending a picture of that page. For sensitive documents, that is the moment to use a local model. See On-premise architecture.