Building a Free AI PDF Assistant: How I Solved Parsing Issues and Minimized LLM Costs (opens in new tab)

As a developer, my desk is constantly cluttered with documentation, API references, and whitepapers. A few months ago, I got tired of spending hours reading 50-page PDF specifications just to find a single configuration line. I decided to scratch my own itch and build a lightweight, web-based RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) tool to "chat" with PDFs. In this post, I want to share the technical hurdles I ran into—specifically regarding PDF parsing layout traps and token cost optimization—a...