30-SECOND SUMMARY
What to take away
- Distinguish text PDFs from scans.
- Preserve page identifiers while chunking.
- Check every important claim against the source page.
From PDF to grounded summary
Extraction quality comes first.
- 01EXTRACT
Text or OCR
- 02CLEAN
Keep pages and order
- 03SUMMARIZE
Chunk then merge
- 04VERIFY
Check source pages
Identify the PDF type
Selectable text usually indicates a text PDF; scanned pages require OCR. Tables and multi-column layouts can corrupt reading order.
Inspect extraction
Check repeated headers, line breaks, tables, footnotes, and page numbers before sending text to a model.
Summarize in stages
Summarize page-aware chunks, then merge those summaries. For focused questions, retrieve only relevant chunks.
Verify and delete
Compare numbers and conclusions with source pages. Delete extracted text, indexes, chats, and backups—not only the original.
- Flag claims without a page
- Check table values manually
- Exclude unsupported conclusions
- Locate every sensitive copy
Frequently asked questions
Can it handle scans?
Yes after OCR, but sample-check recognition errors.
Should I insert an entire long PDF?
Chunking or retrieval is often more reliable and memory-efficient.
Is a local summary automatically private?
No. Extraction files, indexes, logs, and backups also matter.
Primary sources
Check the original documentation for version-specific details.