PDF Ingestion

Three ways to feed a PDF to the model, in increasing order of preprocessing:

1. Native PDF input — pass the file directly. Model sees pages as images + extracted text. Best for docs under ~100 pages with meaningful layout (tables, figures, forms). Preserves structure.

2. Text extraction then send — pdftotext / pypdf / equivalent, then send the text. Loses layout but cheap. Fine for prose-heavy docs where tables don't matter.

3. Extract → chunk → summarize → send — for docs >100 pages or when you'll query the same doc many times. Preprocess once, cache the summary.

Deciding which path