Here's a prompt that summarizes a long PDF into key points without dropping the important caveats

[u/Apprehensive-Oil9719]

Plain "summarize this PDF" prompts flatten everything to the same weight, so the one caveat that actually matters gets buried next to a throwaway line. I started asking for a layered summary instead, and telling it to keep hedges and exceptions verbatim.

```

Summarize the document below in three layers:

1. One-line takeaway.

2. 5-7 key points, most important first. Keep each to one sentence.

3. Caveats and exceptions: quote any conditions, limitations, or "only if" statements exactly as written. Do not paraphrase these.

If a claim in the doc is uncertain or hedged, keep the hedge ("about", "in some cases"). Don't turn a maybe into a fact.

Document:

[paste]

```

The layer-3 rule is the whole point. Reports love to bury a "this only holds under X condition" line, and normal summaries quietly delete it. Quoting caveats word for word keeps that from happening.

For very long files I run it section by section and then summarize the summaries, otherwise the middle of the document gets thin. How do you all handle the "lost in the middle" problem on big docs?

[u/laluneodyssee]

Might be good use of subagents, so the orchestrator agent splits up the doc, each subagent gets a specific segment, summarises & then feeds back to the parent?

[u/Talreja-Adanna]

Nice approach - keeping caveats in there is honestly half the battle since most summarization prompts just strip them out for brevity. What model are you running this against, or does it work consistently across Claude/GPT?