This product was not featured by Product Hunt yet. It will not be visible on their landing page and won't be ranked (cannot win product of the day regardless of upvotes).
rec-format converts any PDF into a compact, AI-optimized format that uses ~100 tokens per page instead of ~1,600. A 16× reduction with zero information loss. Unlike raw Markdown,rec preserves page references, embeds metadata, guarantees file integrity via SHA-256, and supports images for vision-capable models. The result: academics, students, and developers can feed entire documents into AI context windows that would otherwise overflow at a fraction of the cost.
Hey PH 👋
I built rec-format because I kept watching my Anthropic bill climb every time I fed a PDF to Claude. A 100-page research paper? ~160,000 tokens. Just to read it.
So I asked a dumb question: what if the file format itself was the problem?
PDFs were designed for printers and people. Margins, fonts, embedded images, invisible metadata, none of it means anything to an AI. You're paying for pixels dressed up as text.
.rec strips all of that. Same document, same information, same structure but compressed, paginated, and schema-typed so a language model can actually parse it cleanly. ~100 tokens per page instead of ~1,600. On a 100-page doc, that's 150,000 tokens back in your pocket on every single API call.
"Why not just convert to Markdown?" — I get this one a lot. Honest answer: token cost inside the context window is nearly identical. The real difference is everything else:
Page references. Every block knows which page it came from. Ask the AI "what's on page 9?" and it actually knows. Markdown has no concept of pages.
Embedded metadata. Title, language, source file, page count, baked into the file as standard fields, not a frontmatter convention you may or may not follow.
Integrity guarantee. SHA-256 checksum so you know the file arrived complete and unmodified. Markdown has nothing like this.
Unambiguous schema. No dialects, no parser disagreements. Every block is typed JSON, a footnote is always a footnote, everywhere.
Vision model support. Image regions are extracted as base64 PNG and passed directly to Claude or GPT-4V. Markdown just loses them.
Is it perfect? No. Tricky layouts still trip it up sometimes. But for anyone feeding research papers, reports, or lecture notes into an AI, it works, and it saves real money.
Open format. Open source. Free to use.
Happy to answer anything 👇
A.Recai
The approach behind AI optimized PDF Converter is exciting, especially the focus on pDF for AI. AI Native PDF Converter.. Big congratulations on the launch! 🚀
About AI optimized PDF Converter on Product Hunt
“ PDF for AI. AI Native PDF Converter.”
AI optimized PDF Converter was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 9 upvotes and 2 comments, placing #69 on the daily leaderboard. rec-format converts any PDF into a compact, AI-optimized format that uses ~100 tokens per page instead of ~1,600. A 16× reduction with zero information loss. Unlike raw Markdown,rec preserves page references, embeds metadata, guarantees file integrity via SHA-256, and supports images for vision-capable models. The result: academics, students, and developers can feed entire documents into AI context windows that would otherwise overflow at a fraction of the cost.
AI optimized PDF Converter was featured in Productivity (658.2k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 152.5k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted AI optimized PDF Converter?
AI optimized PDF Converter was hunted by A. Recai Acikgoz. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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A. Recai Acikgoz