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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 Pro
PDF size 50 MB 200 MB
Pages per PDF 500 2000
Total storage 1 GB 50 GB
Files per source 1 1

A typical textbook chapter PDF is 5-30 MB / 30-80 pages. A full textbook is 50-200 MB / 400-1000 pages. Both work fine on Pro.

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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