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Using Html2Text MCP Server with LM Studio

This guide explains how to install and configure the Html2Text MCP Server for use with LM Studio.

The server runs locally and allows LM Studio to convert HTML to plain text via structured tool calls.

Download the Binary

Go to the GitHub Releases page and download the archive for your platform:

  • html2text-mcp-win-x64.zip (Windoze)
  • html2text-mcp-linux-x64.tar.gz (Linux)
  • html2text-mcp-osx-arm64.tar.gz (MacOS)

Extract the archive.

You should now have:

  • Windows: html2text-mcp.exe
  • Linux/macOS: html2text-mcp

Place the Binary on Your PATH

LM Studio launches MCP servers by running a command.
That command must be available on your system PATH.

Windows

Windoze does not include a bin directory by default, so you have to create one, e.g. C:\Tools\bin. Add it to your path through the usual Edit the system environment variables malarkey. Then copy html2text-mcp.exe into that directory.

To test it, run:

html2text-mcp

Linux and MacOS

Move the binary to a common user bin directory, e.g.:

chmod +x html2text-mcp
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
mv html2text-mcp ~/.local/bin/

Ensure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH. Restart your terminal and test:

html2text-mcp

Configure LM Studio

Update LM Studio's mcp.json configuration file to include the following (note the slight difference in naming for discoverability, "2" -> "To", but you are free to call this what you like):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "HtmlToText": {
      "command": "html2text-mcp"
    }
  }
}

The file is usually found in either ~/.lmstudio/mcp.json or %USERPROFILE%\.lmstudio\mcp.json on Windows and there is now a UI button for it on the developer tab (CTRL+2).

Verify it works

  1. Restart LM Studio (if it was already running).

  2. Open a new chat session. Load your favourite model trained for tool use.

  3. Enable the tool mcp/html-to-text by clicking the "Integrations" hammer icon.

  4. Enter:

    Convert this HTML to text please: <h1>Hello</h1><p>World</p>

  5. LM Studio should automatically:

    • Discover the mcp/html-to-text tools, convert_html_to_text and convert_html_file_to_text
    • Call the convert_html_to_text method
    • Return the plain text output

    Expected result:

    Hello
World

If the response appears without errors, the MCP server is configured correctly.

The tools

There are currently two methods in the MCP server project, which are the tools exposed when you hook it up:

  • convert_html_to_text: This method takes a string and returns a string. Fine for small amounts of html, since it requires dealing with the input document and the returned output in the agent's context window.
  • convert_html_file_to_text: This method takes a file name and writes the plain text output to a file with a .txt extension. This is much more useful for saving token budgets, especially when bulk processing. All that is required is a single file name because conversion and output writing happens inside the MCP tool.