PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A compliance application running on Amazon Bedrock sends financial prospectuses to Claude. The balance sheets and multi-column footnotes only carry their meaning with the page layout intact.
How should the application supply these documents?
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Answer: A base64-encoded document content block in the user message
A document content block lets Claude read the text and the visual layout together, which is what tables and multi-column footnotes need. url and file_id sources are both valid on the first-party API, but on Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud only base64-encoded sources are available, so neither reaches this deployment. An image block needs an image media type, which means rasterizing each page and giving up the text layer the document block reads alongside the layout.
Official Source: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/pdf-support ↗