Adam Sand shows how to cut AI token usage on large PDFs by converting them to Markdown first. A free PDF-to-Markdown converter strips images and tables in 30 seconds, leaving just readable text. Feed the Markdown to your AI instead and use a fraction of the tokens.
So here's a way to not burn your tokens and end up finishing up your usage in the middle of something. So if you have a 40,000-character token PDF, because it's got pictures and graphs and tables and formatting and all kinds of stuff that your AI doesn't need to read it— meanwhile, AI can consume 4,000 contacts of information and doesn't need to see it in a nice clean table. Well, same thing goes with PDFs. It doesn't need all your fancy formatting. It doesn't need that. It'll read it in Markdown. And so you can use a free tool, takes 30 seconds, Just Google it, PDF to Markdown converter. Very simple, very widely available free tool. And you convert that PDF that's beautiful and great for you and your human eyes and your need for paragraphs and structure and line breaks and clear separation of content. The same reason I gotta build these slides, I can't put it all on one slide. I gotta go through it like a picture book because that's how we think. That's how we learn. You convert the PDF to a Markdown and then you feed that into your AI.
