What Are Some Workarounds for Getting Claude to Read PDFs?

Another approach is to create a Claude project and add the PDF to its knowledge base. Claude will automatically convert it to plain text, which you can then easily work with. If your PDF includes images you want to keep, a quick screenshot of the relevant pages does the trick because Claude can read text from images too!

I would have Claude execute a simple Python script that uses the pdfplumber library to extract text from the PDF. Here's a quick example of the script:

```python
import pdfplumber
import sys

def read_pdf(file_path):
text = ""
try:
with pdfplumber.open(file_path) as pdf:
for page in pdf.pages:
page_text = page.extract_text()
if page_text:
text += page_text + "n"
except Exception as e:
print(f"Error reading PDF: {e}")
return None
return text

if __name__ == "__main__":
if len(sys.argv) != 2:
print("Usage: python pdf_reader.py ")
sys.exit(1)

pdf_path = sys.argv[1]
content = read_pdf(pdf_path)
if content:
print(content)
```

This way, you can run `python pdf_reader.py document.pdf` and analyze the output as needed!

If you're on Linux, I've had success with using pandoc to convert PDFs to markdown. Once you have it in markdown, Claude can read it without any issues.

One thing you could do is prompt Claude to use command line tools to convert the PDF into a plain text format. It makes it easier for Claude to read and understand the content.

I like to read the PDFs to Claude as if I'm telling it a bedtime story. It might sound silly, but it works for me!