Originally published at claudeguide.io/claude-pdf-document-analysis

Claude PDF Analysis: How to Extract Information from Documents

Claude can analyse PDFs in two ways: send the PDF directly as a base64-encoded file (up to 32MB, supports tables and images) or extract the text first and send it as plain text (better cost control, required for PDFs over 32MB). For most document analysis tasks — contract review, invoice extraction, report summarisation — the direct PDF approach is simpler and handles formatting better. For very large document sets, text extraction + optional RAG is more cost-efficient.

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Method 1: Send PDF directly to Claude (simplest)

python
import anthropic
import base64
from pathlib import Path

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

def analyse_pdf(pdf_path: str, question: str) -

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