2 creditsAsk a PDF API — question answering with verified citations
Ask a question in plain English; get an answer with page-level citations that are checked against the real page text before they're returned.
Ask a PDF answers a natural-language question by first selecting the most relevant pages (a lexical overlap score against the question, not a full vector index) and sending only those to an LLM, which keeps cost and latency down on long documents. Every citation the model returns is independently checked as a real substring of the page text it claims to come from — a citation that doesn't actually appear on that page is dropped, and the response's confidence score is reduced for each one dropped, rather than passing through an unverifiable quote.
How does the Ask a PDF API work?
One HTTP request from any language. Every ASHDOCS endpoint uses the same X-API-Key header.
curl -X POST 'https://api.ashdocs.com/api/v2/tools/pdf-ask' \
-H 'X-API-Key: ash_live_...' \
-F 'file=@manual.pdf' -F 'options={"question":"What is the maximum operating temperature?"}'Common use cases
- →Answering a support question against a manual
- →Pulling one fact out of a long contract without reading it
- →Letting a chatbot cite the exact page it got an answer from
Frequently asked questions
How much does the Ask a PDF API tool cost?+
2 credits per successful call. Sandbox keys (prefix ash_test_) run the tool end-to-end without ever consuming credits — use them in CI or for tuning.
What is the endpoint URL for this tool?+
The endpoint is documented in the curl example on this page. All ASHDOCS endpoints share the base URL https://www.ashdocs.com and require an X-API-Key header.
Can I run this tool inside Make, Zapier, or n8n?+
Yes — through each platform's built-in HTTP mechanism (Make's HTTP module, Webhooks by Zapier, n8n's HTTP Request node). Nothing to install: point it at this exact endpoint with your X-API-Key header. See /integrations/make, /integrations/zapier or /integrations/n8n for step-by-step setup.
Does this tool support batch or scheduled runs?+
Yes. POST /api/v1/batch runs any tool over up to 50 files with a single credit ledger entry, and pipeline schedules let you trigger the same tool on a cron. Both are documented in /docs.