Why an unchecked summary is the dangerous one
A summary is most useful for a document you have not read, which is exactly the situation in which you cannot tell a good summary from a wrong one. Most summarisers hand back a clean block of prose with nothing pointing back at the source. It reads well either way.
The failure is quiet. A ninety-page tender document might set the bid bond at 2 percent in one clause and 5 percent in an annexure, and a summary that picks the wrong figure reads exactly as confidently as one that picks the right figure. You have no way of noticing.
So every point here arrives with the page it came from. You are not being asked to trust the summary whole — you check the two or three points you will actually act on, and read the rest as orientation. Checking one page takes seconds; re-reading ninety does not.
What a scanned PDF actually contains
A PDF is a container, and two files that look identical on screen can hold completely different things. One holds text — characters, positions, fonts. The other holds a photograph of a page, which is what a phone scan, an office photocopier or an old court order usually produces. On screen they are indistinguishable.
Extraction on the second kind returns an empty string. Many summarisers never check for that — they pass the empty text along, and a model given nothing to work with writes a plausible paragraph about a document it has never seen. Nothing in the output tells you this has happened.
This tool counts what came out of each page and stops when there is nothing to summarise, telling you the file is a scan rather than inventing around it. It does not read the images itself. It points you at the AI OCR tool, which recognises the text and hands back a version this one can work from.
Where citations help and where they stop
Page numbers change how you read the output. Instead of accepting or rejecting the whole summary, you can treat each point as a claim with an address — the penalty clause on page 34, the revised fee on page 12 — and go straight there. That is a different kind of reading.
What a citation does not do is prove the point is right. It tells you where to look, and the extraction can attach a page correctly while the sentence built on top of it overstates or flattens what that page said. The check is still yours to make.
Use it where being roughly right is enough — deciding whether a 300-page report is worth your evening, or finding which section of a syllabus covers a topic. Where the number goes into a contract, a filing or an answer script, read the page. A summary is a reading aid.