Transcription
Everyone uploading PDFs to Claude is basically wasting their tokens. And Microsoft had a free solution to this for months.
So every time you upload a PDF, Claude has to process the entire thing. The formatting, the broken tables, the images, and all the extra junk inside the file. And each PDF page can consume between 1,500 to 3,000 tokens. So a 20-page document burns through up to 70,000 tokens in one shot. And this is before you even ask your first question.
The fix is simple. It's called Market It Down, a free Microsoft tool with over 110,000 stars on GitHub. It takes any file, be it PDFs, Word docs, Excel sheets, PowerPoints, or even YouTube videos, and converts them into clean markdown text. This drops your token usage by up to 70%. And Claude actually gives better answers because it was trained on millions of markdown documents and understands the format natively.
Plus, Markdown comes with an MCP server, meaning when you connect it to Claude desktop, it automatically converts every file you upload to an MD file. So, check the pinned comment for the tool link and the full PDF.