apud MCP server

apud

IIIF-grounded, citable vision for historical documents.

Vision-language models can read manuscripts, but they cannot say where they read what they report, and their answers cannot be checked by a scholar. apud sits between IIIF collections and models:

• fetches canvas regions from any IIIF Image API server at the best resolution the server and the model allow (Image API v2/v3, Presentation v2/v3, lenient parsing of real-world manifests), including Level 0 static servers, where the region is stitched from the covering tiles (or cut from the closest declared size) on the client;
• keeps every model output anchored to canvas coordinates, even when the served image size differs from the canvas;
• emits W3C Web Annotations (xywh fragment selectors) and IIIF Content State links, so every transcription can be opened at the exact spot in Mirador or any IIIF viewer.

apud (Latin, "in the work of") is how philologists cite a source they read in someone else's text.

Status: pre-alpha.

Packages

The benchmark lives in a separate repository: apud-bench.

Quick look

from apud.client import IIIFClient
from apud.iiif import Region, canvas_to_image

with IIIFClient() as iiif:
    manifest = iiif.manifest("https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/metadata/iiif/csg-0390/manifest.json")
    canvas = manifest.canvases[10]
    service = iiif.image_service(canvas.image_service)
    region = canvas_to_image(Region(200, 300, 800, 400), service.width, service.height, canvas)
    request, jpeg = iiif.region(service, region, max_side=1568)

MCP server

uvx apud-mcp

Tools: describe_manifest, view_region, annotate_transcription.

Development

uv sync
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check . && uv run ruff format --check .

License

Apache-2.0. See CITATION.cff for how to cite.