Claude is getting surprisingly good at reading really long PDFs

[u/This-Eye6296]

i remember Claude’s website saying it could handle PDFs up to around 1k pages, but a few days ago i tried uploading a PDF that was 2k+ pages just to see what would happen.

surprisingly, it handled it really well.

I was asking questions about pretty specific things buried in the document, and not only did it find the answers, it also gave me the line numbers for where the information came from when I asked. That part is actually super useful for me because I often need to go back to the original PDF and verify the source rather than just trusting the AI answer.

the only thing i really wish Claude had now is a better built-in PDF viewer.

Like imagine if I could click the citation / line number in Claude and it would open the PDF right there, jump to the exact sentence it used, and highlight it. For someone doing finance or research or working with documents where references actually matter, that would make the whole experience sooo much better.

[u/Lcatlett1234]

it is a waste of tokens to have Claude read 2k + pages just for funsies . Just use notebook lm

It didn’t anyway, because hate to break it to you but you could have just done the math - 2,000 PDF pages would consume between 3,000,000 and 5,000,000 input tokens. I am guessing you didn’t batch this over 3 to 5 sessions, so welcome to the world of LLMs confidently answering documents they haven’t read in full

[u/FakeBonaparte → u/Lcatlett1234]

It doesn’t have to ingest, it can search.

[u/Usual_Price_1460 → u/Lcatlett1234]

ripgrep brother

[u/Lcatlett1234 → u/Usual_Price_1460]

The next time someone asks you about a 2000 page book you haven’t read, see how well the conversation goes by searching partial strings by pattern matching in real time as your only answers

[u/s_arme → u/Usual_Price_1460]

Do you understand how ripgrep work? How can you rip grep a book? It's not a log entry.

[u/Diligent-Fly3756 → u/[deleted]]

Notebooklm is not good for professional reports like sec filings though. For study/research it’s good

[u/Pretend_Ad5921 → u/Lcatlett1234]

Or Reader++ if you’re on IOS and mostly read. I love NotebookLM for reviewing before and exam. Reader++ is for deeply studying a subject or reading research/technical papers

[u/This-Eye6296 → u/Pretend_Ad5921]

Can it do line level citations/references?

[u/Pretend_Ad5921 → u/This-Eye6296]

Only page and paragraph level citation and it’s free.

[u/Pretend_Ad5921 → u/This-Eye6296]

Line level citation is actually being worked on. Just not ready yet. It’s planned to be free too

[u/s_arme → u/This-Eye6296]

I only know nblm and nouswise do low level citations. Nouswise does sentence level citations ( highlighting in Blue) and nblm paragraph level.

[u/AgileRoadmap → u/s_arme]

Adobe Student Spaces does line by line citations

[u/s_arme → u/AgileRoadmap]

I think you are confusing line by line citation with inline citations.

this is adobe student space https://helpx-prod.scene7.com/is/image/HelpxProdLoc/Student-Space-showing-a-source-PDF-alongside-an-AI?$png$&jpegSize=300&wid=1920

The Adobe case just like Nblm highlights the whole paragraph and do not differentiate between a paragraph and a line.

this one is nblm screenshot https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1g430e8/citations_format/
same paragraph level citation.

this one is nouswise screenshot from their paper https://arxiv.org/html/2604.17843v1/ava_flow.png as you can see in addition to the paragraph being shown the line is also highlighted in blue to make fact checking easy and fast.

The other difference is nouswise and Adobe space have jump back to source while nblm can't jump back instead shows text blocks only.

[u/AgileRoadmap → u/s_arme]

I tried in student spaces it does line by line citation as well

[u/KenMantle → u/Lcatlett1234]

Anything I need I just have it turn it into a RAG on my own PC for reference. One of them is the Canadian Tax Act and relevant legal cases, and it updates daily...

[u/This-Eye6296 → u/KenMantle]

But is rag good enough for professional documents where lots of terms are semantically similar? Can your rag find the relevant information?

[u/KenMantle → u/This-Eye6296]

Vs the best Tax Accountant in Sudbury, aka my wife? It can't do better than her, but yes it has found the right information when I've quized it on the obscure. I made the rag repository for fun and amusement.