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Upload a PDF

Drag-drop a PDF (or click to pick) and Ritsu turns it into Points of Knowledge in under a minute.

2 min read

PDFs are the most common source on Ritsu. Textbooks, papers, lecture slides exported as PDF — they all work. Most uploads finish in under a minute.

Steps

  1. Open Sources from the left sidebar.
  2. Click Upload file (or drag the PDF onto the page).
  3. Wait for processing. A progress bar shows: parse → extract → embed → done.
  4. When it's done, the source appears in your library with a list of Points of Knowledge auto-extracted (one per chapter or section).
  5. Click any PoK to open the Learning Chat scoped to it.

What Ritsu does with the PDF

  • Parse — extracts text + structure (headings, lists, tables, captions). Fonts and layout are stripped; we keep the meaning.
  • OCR if needed — for scanned PDFs (no embedded text), we run OCR. Adds ~30 seconds for a 100-page book. Works in EN, VI, and 30+ other languages.
  • Section detection — Ritsu finds chapter / section boundaries from headings + table of contents. Each section becomes one PoK.
  • Embed — content is embedded for fast semantic search across the book. /search works across the whole source.

Limits

Item Free Plus Pro Ultra
Pages per source 40 100 200 500
File size 20 MB 20 MB 20 MB 20 MB
Total storage 10 GB 10 GB 10 GB 10 GB

A typical textbook chapter runs 30–80 pages, so on Free, upload the section you're studying or split the chapter. Every plan caps a file at 20 MB — compress a larger PDF or split it into chapters. Reading a PDF's pages uses credits (around 1 credit per page). The current limits for each plan are always on the pricing page.

OCR quirks

  • Math notation comes through as best-effort. Equations from LaTeX-rendered PDFs are nearly perfect; equations from scanned books may have errors. Run /explain "the equation on page X" if you suspect garbled OCR.
  • Two-column layouts read correctly. Tables read top-to-bottom, left-to-right.
  • Diagrams + figures are extracted as images and indexed by their captions. You can ask "show me figure 3.2" and Ritsu will surface it.

Tips

  • Smaller PDFs make better PoKs. A 50-page chapter produces sharper PoKs than a 800-page tome. If you only need chapters 4-6, export just those pages first.
  • Watermarks confuse OCR. Heavily-watermarked PDFs (publisher samples, library copies) sometimes have text mixed with watermark fragments. Workaround: re-export from the source.
  • Encrypted PDFs must be unlocked first. We won't process password-protected files.

Trouble

If upload fails, see Upload failed. For a full file-types list, see Supported file types and size limits.

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