How to Summarize a PDF with ChatGPT (Free Methods That Work)
You’ve got a 40-page PDF. Could be a contract, a research paper, a report your boss sent, or a manual for something you bought three years ago. You need the key points. You don’t have time to read the whole thing. Good news: ChatGPT can help. Bad news: it’s not as simple as “upload and summarize.” Let me walk you through what actually works, free-first. Why PDF Summarization Is Trickier Than It Sounds ChatGPT reads text. PDFs are sometimes text, sometimes images of text, sometimes a nightmare combination of both. If your PDF was scanned rather than digitally created, ChatGPT can’t read it directly — it just sees an image. So the method you use depends on what kind of PDF you have. ...