Stop uploading raw PDFs to Claude and other AI tools.
The PDF itself is probably costing more tokens than the actual conversation. Every page contains formatting, tables, images, and metadata that the AI has to process before answering your first question. For larger documents, that adds up quickly; it can reach up to 70,000 tokens before you’ve typed anything!
Instead of feeding raw PDFs into AI, convert PDF to Markdown first.
Microsoft’s open-source MarkItDown tool converts PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and more into clean .md files.
Token usage can drop by up to 70%, and because AI models are heavily trained on Markdown-formatted content, the quality of responses often improves as well.
The part I love most is that it comes with an MCP server. Connect it to Claude Desktop, and every file you upload is automatically converted to .md.
If you regularly work with documents in Claude, ChatGPT, or other AI tools, convert them to Markdown first.
🔗 GitHub Repo: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown