CREPE — Compile, Research, Export, Presentation Engine

An MCP server for Goose that turns an AI agent into a capable slide author: draft decks in Pandoc Markdown, compile to Beamer PDF or PowerPoint, validate visually with PNG exports, and pull in research from the web, Wikipedia and Semantic Scholar.

Tools (12 total)

Presentation (stateful)

Tool	Purpose
create_presentation	Start a new deck, set all metadata
get_presentation	Inspect metadata + slide list
get_slide	Read a single slide's full content
set_slide	Add or replace a slide (index < len → replace, else append)
compile_presentation	Compile to PDF (Beamer/lualatex) or PPTX (pandoc)
render_slides_as_pngs	Render compiled artifact to PNG sequence for validation
cleanup_presentation	Delete a presentation's in-memory state and on-disk scratch dir

Research & utilities

Tool	Purpose
academic_search	Semantic Scholar (no key needed)
web_search	Tavily API web search
wikipedia_search	Wikipedia article search
wikipedia_read	Full Wikipedia article text
fetch_webpage	Extract text from any URL (headless browser or urllib)

Installation

# From PyPI (once published)
uv tool install crepe-mcp

# From source
git clone https://github.com/mariolpantunes/crepe-mcp
cd crepe-mcp
uv tool install .

System requirements

• pandoc — slide compilation
• lualatex — PDF/Beamer output (texlive-full or MacTeX)
• pymupdf — PDF→PNG rendering (installed via pip, no system dep)
• PPTX→PNG rendering — platform-dependent:
  • Linux: LibreOffice is required (native soffice/libreoffice on PATH, or installed as a Flatpak — flatpak install flathub org.libreoffice.LibreOffice, auto-detected at runtime, no config needed). There is no fallback on Linux: aspose-slides' embedded .NET runtime dynamically loads libssl.so.1.1, which distros that ship only OpenSSL 3 (Slackware, recent Arch, etc.) no longer have, and no newer aspose-slides release has moved off it. Without LibreOffice, render_slides_as_pngs (format="pptx") returns a clean error instead of a crash.
  • macOS (and other platforms): LibreOffice is preferred if found (native binary or /Applications/LibreOffice.app); otherwise falls back to aspose-slides (installed via pip — no OpenSSL 1.1 issue on macOS). Aspose is a commercial library; without CREPE_ASPOSE_LICENSE_PATH it runs in evaluation mode and watermarks output PNGs.

Environment variables

All variables are prefixed with CREPE_ to avoid collisions.

Variable	Required	Purpose
CREPE_TAVILY_API_KEY	No	Enables web_search via Tavily; graceful warning if absent
CREPE_HEADLESS_BROWSER_PATH	No	Path to Chromium-compatible browser for fetch_webpage. See macOS Browser Paths below. Falls back to urllib if unset.
CREPE_LIBREOFFICE_PATH	No	Path to a soffice/libreoffice executable, overriding auto-detection. Required on Linux only if auto-detection (PATH, Flatpak) fails.
CREPE_ASPOSE_LICENSE_PATH	No	Path to Aspose .lic file for watermark-free PPTX→PNG export on the aspose fallback path (macOS/other, when LibreOffice isn't found). Evaluation mode (with watermarks) is used if unset.

macOS & Headless Browser Setup

To enable JavaScript-rendered webpage fetching via fetch_webpage on macOS, set CREPE_HEADLESS_BROWSER_PATH to any Chromium-based browser application path:

• Google Chrome: /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome
• Brave Browser: /Applications/Brave Browser.app/Contents/MacOS/Brave Browser
• Microsoft Edge: /Applications/Microsoft Edge.app/Contents/MacOS/Microsoft Edge

Note on Safari: Apple's native Safari (safaridriver) does not support CLI --headless mode for DOM dumping (--dump-dom). If you only have Safari installed or choose not to set CREPE_HEADLESS_BROWSER_PATH, fetch_webpage automatically falls back to pure Python urllib + HTML stripping, which works instantaneously for all static articles, documentation, and Wikipedia pages.

Goose integration

You can automate this entire configuration using our built-in interactive setup script:

# Auto-detect browsers/keys, export profile variables, and register in ~/.config/goose/config.yaml
./setup.py --install

# To remove and clean up later:
./setup.py --uninstall

Alternatively, you can add crepe-mcp manually to ~/.config/goose/config.yaml using one of the options below.

Use envs (literal values), not env_keys. Goose resolves every env_keys entry against its own keyring/secrets store — it does not fall back to a plain shell environment variable of the same name. All of CREPE's env vars are optional, and declaring one under env_keys without a matching Goose secret makes the whole extension fail to start with Failed to fetch secret ... not found. Only fill in the values you actually need (all are optional; omit any you don't use):

Option 1: Run directly from your local clone (Recommended for testing)

If you cloned the repository locally (e.g. to ~/git/crepe-mcp), you can tell Goose to execute it directly via uv run without installing it globally:

extensions:
  crepe:
    name: crepe
    type: stdio
    cmd: uv
    args: ["--directory", "/home/username/git/crepe-mcp", "run", "crepe-mcp"]
    envs:
      CREPE_TAVILY_API_KEY: ""
      CREPE_HEADLESS_BROWSER_PATH: ""
      CREPE_ASPOSE_LICENSE_PATH: ""
      CREPE_LIBREOFFICE_PATH: ""

(Replace /home/username/git/crepe-mcp with your actual absolute path to the repository).

Option 2: Run as an installed tool (uv tool install .)

If you ran uv tool install . inside the project directory (or installed via pip), crepe-mcp is on your PATH:

extensions:
  crepe:
    name: crepe
    type: stdio
    cmd: crepe-mcp
    args: []
    envs:
      CREPE_TAVILY_API_KEY: ""
      CREPE_HEADLESS_BROWSER_PATH: ""
      CREPE_ASPOSE_LICENSE_PATH: ""
      CREPE_LIBREOFFICE_PATH: ""

Option 3: Run ephemerally via uvx (Once published to PyPI)

If running directly from PyPI without local installation:

extensions:
  crepe:
    name: crepe
    type: stdio
    cmd: uvx
    args: ["crepe-mcp"]
    envs:
      CREPE_TAVILY_API_KEY: ""
      CREPE_HEADLESS_BROWSER_PATH: ""
      CREPE_ASPOSE_LICENSE_PATH: ""
      CREPE_LIBREOFFICE_PATH: ""

Option 4: Add via Goose CLI (goose configure)

If you prefer Goose's interactive terminal setup instead of editing config.yaml:

1. Run goose configure in your terminal.
2. Select Add Extension → Command-line Extension (stdio).
3. For Name, enter: crepe
4. For Command, enter either:
   • crepe-mcp (if installed globally)
   • OR uv --directory /path/to/crepe-mcp run crepe-mcp (for local repo)
5. When prompted for environment variables, add them as literal values (CREPE_TAVILY_API_KEY, etc.) — all are optional, so only add the ones you use. If goose configure only offers a secrets/keyring option rather than a plain value, prefer editing config.yaml directly (Options 1-3 above) to use envs instead.

Typical agent workflow

# Build a deck
create_presentation(title="My Talk", author="Ada Lovelace")
set_slide(id, 0, "Introduction", "- Point one\n- Point two")
set_slide(id, 1, "Results", "$$E=mc^2$$")

# Validate PDF layout
compile_presentation(id, "/tmp/deck.pdf", format="pdf")
render_slides_as_pngs(id, format="pdf")   # → slide_001.png …

# Deliver as PPTX
compile_presentation(id, "/tmp/deck.pptx", format="pptx")
render_slides_as_pngs(id, format="pptx")  # validate PPTX layout

Pandoc slide syntax quick reference

Element	Syntax
Section divider	# Section Title as slide content
Bullet	- item
Incremental bullet	> - item
Math block	$$ E=mc^2 $$
Code	```python\ncode\n```
Image	
Speaker notes	::: notes\ntext\n:::
Two-column layout	:::: {.columns}\n::: {.column width="50%"}\nLeft\n:::\n::: {.column width="50%"}\nRight\n:::\n::::

License

MIT