Use Plain Text Over Heavy PDFs (Text-First Token Hygiene) (AI Skill)

Overview

When you upload a multi-page PDF or image-heavy document into an AI assistant, modern multimodal models often convert the pages into high-resolution images, consuming up to 1,600 visual tokens per page while struggling with multi-column text wrap and table borders.

The Text-First Token Hygiene Protocol advocates extracting raw plain text or clean Markdown before prompting - reducing token usage by up to 80%, slashing latency from 20 seconds to 1 second, and eliminating visual OCR errors.

Heavy PDF Upload vs. Clean Plain Text