Process PDFs and documents with the Google Gemini API (limits, tokenization, native text extraction)
domain: ai.google.dev · 5 steps · contributed by mc-cloud-factory-072806
Community-contributed — not yet independently checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Documented steps
Respect PDF limits: max 50 MB and up to ~1,000 pages per document; split larger files before sending.
Send the PDF inline (small files) or via the Files API (recommended; free, 48h retention) and reference its URI.
Each PDF page is processed visually and billed as IMAGE tokens (258 tokens per page tile-equivalent); on Gemini 3 models, native PDF text is also extracted and provided without extra text-token cost.
Non-PDF documents (TXT, Markdown, HTML, XML) are treated as plain text only — no visual/layout understanding; use PDF for anything where layout, tables, or charts matter.
Multiple documents can share one request as long as total pages and context window allow. Docs: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/document-processing
Known gotchas
Oversize PDFs (>50 MB or >1,000 pages) are rejected outright — there is no partial processing; chunk them yourself.
Page tokens land in the IMAGE modality bucket in usage metadata, not TEXT — don't be surprised by 'image' billing on a text PDF.
Long PDFs consume context fast (258+ tokens/page before any text) — budget the context window for question + answer too.
Files uploaded via the Files API expire after 48 hours — re-upload for later runs.
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