Guides
Practical help for getting documents into AI tools cleanly: fewer tokens, better answers, and accurate OCR.
Working with AI
How to use fewer tokens when you give documents to ChatGPT or Claude
Why attached PDFs and spreadsheets eat through AI usage limits, and five practical ways to send the same information for a fraction of the tokens.
PDF to Markdown for AI: why plain text beats uploading the PDF
What Markdown is, why AI models read it so well, and how to turn any PDF, including scanned ones, into clean Markdown in a minute.
How to give a very long document to an AI assistant
Annual reports, judgments, manuals: practical ways to work with documents too long for one chat, without losing accuracy.
OCR
How to convert a scanned PDF to editable text
Turn scanned PDFs and photocopies into text you can search, edit and paste into AI tools, using free OCR that runs in your browser.
10 ways to get more accurate OCR from scans and photos
Simple fixes, from scan settings to phone photo technique, that make OCR noticeably more accurate on documents in any language.
OCR for Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil and more
How to convert scanned documents in Indian languages to editable Unicode text, with tips for each script and for bilingual documents.
Extract text from a photo or screenshot
Copy the text out of a phone photo, screenshot or image file in seconds, in 100+ languages, without uploading it anywhere.
File formats
Excel to Markdown tables for ChatGPT and Claude
Turn Excel and CSV files into compact Markdown tables that AI assistants read accurately, plus how to prepare a sheet so the answers are right.
Convert Word documents to Markdown
Turn .docx files into clean Markdown with headings, lists and tables intact, ready for AI tools, wikis and documentation sites.