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DisclaimerUnofficial, and not affiliated with Anthropic. Nearly all of this is read straight out of what ships: npm bundles, captured prompts, published docs. Anthropic's own notes go in verbatim, marked as theirs. The rest is my reading, and every entry carries the strings behind it. If one looks wrong, vote it down and say why.

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Claude Code v2.1.242

PDF reads return the document and page images

You'll notice
Useful4 Signal2
File Tools

Reading a PDF now returns the document itself plus one image per page.

What

Reading a PDF now returns the actual file as a base64 document block, and page extraction returns one image block per page instead of a summary line. A page that fails to render falls back to a placeholder for that page only.

Details
  • The document block is { type: "document", source: { type: "base64", media_type: "application/pdf" } }, included only when base64 data is present.
  • A failed page yields text saying it "could not be processed as an image"; the other pages still come back.
  • Re-reading the same file path carries base64 data and already-extracted pages forward from the previous result.
  • Page ranges are validated up front: formats like 1-5, 3 or 10-20 are accepted, and a range exceeding the per-request page maximum is rejected.
Evidence

could not be processed as an image

Strings lifted out of the shipped bundle, so the claim above can be checked against them.

Related

Other releases about the same thing. Found by shared names or similar wording; neither means one caused the other.

See this entry in the whole of v2.1.242 →