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Draft. This article depends on an open product question and is not ready to publish.
Elephas reads the everyday files on your desk: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, CSV, Markdown, plain text, RTF, HTML, EPUB and images, plus web pages by address. Each file can be up to 200 MB, and images up to 50 MB.

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Supported file types

When you ask, each citation names where the passage came from, such as “page 4”, “slide 3”, “sheet 2”, “paragraphs 12–14” or “lines 40–52”. See citations and sources. The Add Files window only shows supported types. On Windows it may still let you pick another file. Elephas then tells you This file type is not supported yet.

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Size and content limits

A file over the size limit is refused before Elephas copies it: This file is larger than the import limit. A file under the size limit can still hold more than Elephas can safely read, for example a workbook with millions of cells. It then shows This file has more content than Elephas can safely read. Only that file is affected. The other files you added carry on.

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Text encoding

Text, CSV, TSV and Markdown files must be UTF-8, or UTF-16 with a byte order mark. Elephas does not guess older encodings. A file in another encoding shows This file is not valid UTF-8 text. Open it in a text editor and save it as UTF-8, then add it again.

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Not supported yet

  • Apple Pages, Numbers and Keynote files. Export them to PDF, Word, Excel or PowerPoint.
  • Apple Notes. Export the notes you need as PDF or text.
  • Email files (.eml, .emlx, .msg). Save the emails as PDF.
  • HEIC photos, .rtfd bundles and Safari .webarchive files.
  • Audio and video.
  • Password-protected Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and DRM-protected EPUBs. See password-protected PDFs for PDFs.
  • Text inside pictures on slides, and in headers, footers, text boxes and footnotes of Word documents.

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Troubleshooting

Split the file into smaller parts, or for a PDF, save a version with smaller images. Then add the parts.
The file is within the size limit but holds too much content to read safely, such as a very large spreadsheet. Split it into smaller files. For a spreadsheet, export each sheet on its own.
The file has no text Elephas can extract, for example a PDF made only of drawings. If it is a scan, check that text recognition is installed. See scanned PDFs and OCR and file import errors.

Add files and folders

Scanned PDFs and OCR

Large libraries

File import errors