pdfask

I read a lot of dense PDFs — papers, manuals, the occasional 80-page spec — and I didn’t want to scroll through all of it to find the one thing I needed. pdfask lets me just ask.

What it does

Point it at a PDF and ask questions in plain English, right in the terminal. No web app, no upload flow, no setup ritual.

How it works

It uses Claude’s native PDF support, so there’s no text extraction or OCR in the middle — the model reads the document directly, including tables, layout, and embedded images. Prompt caching makes every follow-up question roughly 10× cheaper than the first, so a long back-and-forth over one document stays cheap.

Try it

pip install pdfask

Set an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, point it at a file, and start asking.