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Documents

Uploading PDFs

How PDF files enter the system and become searchable, citable documents.

Supported files

  • Text-based PDFs and scanned PDFs — both are accepted.
  • Files must be 25 MiB or smaller and no more than 100 pages.
  • Research papers, contracts, manuals, financial reports, and other long-form documents.

Every PDF is OCR'd

Unlike many PDF tools, ChatPDF does not read embedded text directly. All uploads — including text-based PDFs — are processed through Mistral OCR 4. This keeps one consistent extraction path for scanned and native PDFs.

Processing states

After upload, a background Convex action runs the full pipeline. The document status moves from uploaded to processing to ready — or failed if it cannot complete.

  1. 01UploadThe file is stored in Convex file storage and connected to a document record.
  2. 02OCRMistral OCR 4 extracts page markdown from the PDF.
  3. 03ChunkStructure-aware retrieval chunks retain OCR and Markdown units with exact page spans. See the retrieval pipeline for boundary and overlap rules.
  4. 04Embed & summarizeChunks are embedded (1536-dim), and per-page plus document summaries are generated.
  5. 05ReadyThe document can be selected for grounded chat and citation lookup.
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The full ingestion pipeline, including the retry path. Transient failures retry up to 3 times before the document is marked failed.

Failure handling

Transient errors (timeouts, rate limits, 5xx responses) are retried automatically — up to three attempts with 15s and 60s backoff. Persistent failures stop the pipeline and surface an error on the document.

First places to check

If a document lands in failed, verify service credentials: the Convex deployment, Clerk keys, OpenAI key, and Mistral API key are the most common causes.