A PDF you added to a note is something the AI can read. There is no need to find the file again and attach it to the chat.
Ask about it
Open the note that holds the PDF and ask in the chat, the way you ask about any note: what does the contract say about renewals, summarize chapter three, which dates are in the syllabus. When the AI reads the note, the text of every PDF in it comes along, page by page, so the answer comes from the document itself and not only from what you wrote around it, and it can tell you which page it found something on. Name another note and its PDFs come along the same way when the AI reads that note.
Grape reads a PDF's text once, on your device, and keeps it, so asking about a PDF never uploads the file again. How Grape reads the PDFs in your notes has the details.
Long PDFs
The AI takes in about 60,000 characters of a note's PDFs at a time, a long paper or a lecture's worth of slides. Ask about a part further into a longer one, chapter nine of a textbook, and the AI reads on from where it stopped until it finds it.
Follow up questions
What the AI read stays with the conversation, so the next question works without reading the note again. The step where the AI read the note lists each PDF under the note's name, so you can see which files it read.
Which models read PDFs
Every chat model reads a PDF's text, local ones included. A scanned PDF is the exception on desktop: it has no text to read, so the file itself goes to the model, which needs Grape Pro Chat Model or an OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or OpenRouter model. On iPhone, iPad and Android the scan is read with the phone's own text recognition first, so it works like any other PDF.
Limits
Up to 1,000 pages of a PDF are read. A PDF added on another device has to finish syncing before the AI can read it on this one, and a password protected PDF cannot be read. A locked note never reaches the AI, and neither do the PDFs inside it.
The images in a note go along the same way, see Ask the AI about an image in a note.