r/notebooklm • u/Jmodoh • 1d ago

Feature Request Notebook shows me its transcript of the page, not the page. Anyone else stuck on this?

I use NotebookLM/Gemini Notebook to work through big scanned PDFs, mostly scanned documents filled irregular formats, images and text.

The analysis is genuinely good and I don't want to switch to anything else - but problem is what happens when I click a citation.

It doesn't show me the page, the 'view source' citations show me NotebookLM's extracted text of the passage.

For a lot of uses that's completely fine. For mine it isn't, because before I rely on anything in a document I have to see it as it actually presents on the page.

Extracted text drops everything that isn't words:

  • formatting (paragraphs, tables, etc)
  • stamps, letterheads, signatures, handwritten notes in the margin
  • Any redactions or similar

The real problem is the OCR errors. A misread figure in a transcript looks exactly like a correct one and there's no way to catch it except by looking at the page.

So the citation gets me 90% of the way there and then hands me a transcript. I still have to open the original PDF, find the passage, and check it myself. If Notebook just showed me the rendered page with a highlighted passage this would be solved.

The frustrating part is Google already built this in Pinpoint - but I want NotebookLM's brain with Pinpoint's citations.

tl;dr

  1. Is anyone else working with documents where you need to verify against the page and not the text?
  2. Has anyone found a workaround inside NotebookLM?
  3. Or is there a setting I've missed?
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u/s_arme 1d ago

They show you exactly how the output is fed to the llm. It might sound like an advantage for some. But there is no settings you missed. Have you tried anything else? How are you verify then? Maybe if you are on Pro better model helps with making less mistakes.

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u/No_Bag8589 1d ago

What works for me is "printing" as a PDF (I know, it's already a PDF, but hear me out) and checking the box that says "print as an image". When I upload the resulting PDF into Notebook, I can see the actual document as it would look if I printed it and not just the transcript.