The AI workspace for your PDFs

PDFs are where knowledge goes to become unfindable. Research papers, contracts, reports, invoices, slide decks, ebooks, manuals, and scanned documents. All locked in a format that most tools treat as a black box. Your file system knows the filename and the date. It doesn't know what's inside. So the report you need is somewhere in a folder of two hundred PDFs, and the only way to find it is to open them one at a time until you recognise it. The PDF did its job of preserving the document. Everything else, searching it, annotating it, connecting it to your other work, is your problem.

Fabric reads every PDF you save, understands what's inside, and makes it searchable by meaning alongside everything else in your workspace. Annotate directly on the page. Ask the AI questions across hundreds of PDFs at once. The format that used to lock knowledge in now gives it up on demand.

Search inside every PDF by meaning

Most tools search PDFs by filename or, at best, by exact text match. Fabric's AI search reads the full content of every PDF and searches by meaning. Ask "the section about liability caps in the Series B financing docs" or "the study that found a correlation between sleep and creative output" and find the right page of the right PDF across your entire library.

This works for scanned documents too. Fabric reads text in scanned PDFs and photographed pages, so a scanned contract or a phone photo of a printed document is as searchable as a native digital PDF. The search doesn't care how the PDF was created. It reads what's on the page.

The AI assistant goes further. Ask it to summarise a PDF, compare sections across multiple documents, extract the key findings from a research paper, or answer a specific question using the content of your PDFs. It works from your documents, citing the sources it draws on.

Annotate directly on the page

Reading a PDF and thinking about it should happen in the same place. Fabric's annotations let you highlight, comment, and mark up any PDF directly on the page. Pin a question to a specific clause. Highlight the key finding in a research paper. Add a note about how a section connects to something else you're working on.

The annotations are searchable. A comment you wrote on page forty-seven of a contract six months ago is findable by searching what you wrote. Your thinking on top of the document becomes as retrievable as the document itself. This is what separates annotating in Fabric from annotating in a PDF viewer: the marginal notes don't stay locked inside the file.

Chat with your PDFs

The AI assistant treats your PDFs as a knowledge base you can converse with. Upload a contract and ask "what are the termination provisions." Drop in a research paper and ask "what methodology did they use and what were the limitations." Add a hundred PDFs to a space and ask "what do these documents collectively say about market size in Southeast Asia."

The assistant reads inside every PDF and answers with references to the specific pages and documents. For single documents, it's a faster way to extract information than reading linearly. For collections, it's a way to synthesise across documents that no manual process can match.

Connected to everything else

The deepest problem with PDFs isn't the format. It's the isolation. A PDF sits in a folder, disconnected from your notes, your meetings, your other research, and the work it relates to. The insights inside it only connect to your other thinking if you manually carry them across.

In Fabric, a PDF lives alongside your notes, meeting transcripts, images, bookmarks, voice memos, and every other file type. When you search, results come from across everything. The finding in a PDF connects to the note you wrote about it, the meeting where you discussed it, and the other documents that address the same topic. The explorer and similar search surface connections between PDFs and other material you wouldn't find manually.

This is especially valuable for research projects and literature reviews, where the point is synthesis across many documents, not just retrieval of one.

Capture PDFs from anywhere

PDFs arrive from every direction: email attachments, web downloads, shared drives, academic databases, scanned mail. Fabric accepts them all.

Save PDFs from the web with the web clipper. Forward email attachments to email-to-note. Pull in existing PDFs from Google Drive or Dropbox. Upload directly from your desktop via desktop file sync. Photograph a printed document on your phone and Fabric reads the text. However the PDF reaches you, it ends up in the same searchable workspace.

Share PDFs with protection and tracking

When you need to share a PDF externally, publish it with password protection and link analytics. Control who has access, see when they've viewed it, and update the document without breaking the link. Useful for contracts, proposals, reports, and any document you want to share securely while retaining control.

Who uses Fabric for PDFs

PDFs touch almost every workflow. Researchers and students manage libraries of academic papers and course readings. Lawyers search across contracts, briefs, and filings. Consultants and consultancies manage client reports and deliverables. Founders and investors share pitch decks and diligence materials via data rooms. Educators curate readings and share resources with students. Anyone managing receipts, manuals, and official documents for life admin.

For structured approaches to working with academic PDFs, see the guides to literature reviews, research workflow, and book notes.

Get started

Make every PDF in your library searchable by what's inside it, not what it's called. Try Fabric free.

FAQs

Can Fabric search inside PDFs by meaning?

Yes. AI search reads the full content of every PDF and searches by meaning. Describe what you're looking for in plain language and find the right page of the right document.

Can Fabric read scanned PDFs?

Yes. Fabric reads text in scanned documents and photographed pages. A scanned contract or a phone photo of a printed page is searchable alongside native digital PDFs.

Can I annotate PDFs directly?

Yes. Annotations let you highlight, comment, and mark up any PDF directly on the page. Your annotations are searchable by what they say.

Can I ask the AI questions about a PDF?

Yes. The AI assistant reads inside your PDFs and answers questions, summarises content, extracts key findings, and compares sections across documents. It cites the source pages.

Can I ask questions across multiple PDFs at once?

Yes. Add PDFs to a space and the assistant can synthesise across all of them. Ask "what do these documents say about X" and get an answer drawing from the full set.

Can I search across PDFs and other file types together?

Yes. Search works across PDFs, notes, images, audio transcripts, emails, and every other file type in your workspace. Results come from everything, not just one format.

Can I share a PDF securely?

Yes. Publish with password protection and link analytics. Control access and see when the recipient has viewed it.

Can I import PDFs from Google Drive or Dropbox?

Yes. Fabric connects to Google Drive, Dropbox, and supports desktop file sync. Bring in existing PDF libraries without re-uploading file by file.

Can I forward PDF attachments from email?

Yes. Forward any email with a PDF attachment to email-to-note and the PDF joins your library, searchable alongside everything else.

How many PDFs can Fabric handle?

There's no practical limit. Whether you have fifty PDFs or five thousand, every one is searchable by meaning.

Are my PDFs private?

Yes. Your content is encrypted and only visible to you unless you choose to share it. Fabric uses AES-256 encryption and is CASA Tier 2 compliant.

How is this different from a PDF reader app?

A PDF reader opens one document at a time. Fabric makes your entire PDF library searchable by meaning, lets you annotate with searchable notes, and gives you an AI that answers questions across all your documents. The difference is between reading a PDF and having a searchable, AI-powered library of every PDF you've ever saved.