How to use Claude Desktop / Cowork with PDFs (not what people say).

One claude.md line saves 90%+ of PDF tokens:

## Reading PDFs

Use 'pdftotext', not the 'Read' tool. Use 'Read' only when the user directly asks to analyze images or charts inside the document.

By default, Cowork converts every PDF page into an image. One page = 3,000 tokens. A few documents and you hit your limit.

Set once, applied to every PDF you'll ever upload.

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P.S. In Claude Code, upload the document into a folder (e.g., Temp/) and reference it in the chat (@). The same instructions work.

When you upload PDF in Claude Code chat, harness calls ‘Read’ automatically.