Agnos
Download

Agnos by Gidion

Prepare documents for Custom GPTs, NotebookLM, Claude Projects and Copilot

Last updated

Custom GPTs, NotebookLM, Claude Projects and Copilot agents all answer from files you upload, and they work from the text in those files. This guide needs no code. It covers why a cleaned plain text file makes a better knowledge file, how to make one with Agnos or by hand, and what each tool’s own help pages say about their limits.

The short answer

For most documents, upload plain text (.txt) that holds only the content: no page headers or footers, no page numbers, no website menus or cookie banners, and no second copies. All four tools accept .txt files.

Keep the original file when its meaning is in the pictures, such as charts or diagrams: a text file has none. Claude reads the images in a PDF of up to 100 pages, and ChatGPT Enterprise can search the visuals in PDFs, so a PDF can be the better choice there.

Why cleaned text files work better

  • The tools read the text. OpenAI says that, outside ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT takes the digital text out of a document and discards its images. Claude reads only the text of project files, apart from multimodal PDFs. Whatever is in that text, useful or not, is what they search.
  • Clutter competes with answers. A PDF’s running header, a page number on every page, a web page’s menu and cookie banner: all of it becomes knowledge the assistant can draw on. A question can bring back the menu instead of the answer.
  • The vendors ask for it. OpenAI’s help for GPT builders recommends clear, “text-forward” files, because complex layouts make content harder for a GPT to use. Microsoft advises keeping the files you give Copilot concise.
  • You can check it. A text file shows exactly what the assistant will read. Open it before you upload it.

A real example: a saved web page

The sample project that comes with Agnos includes support-article.html, a help-center page saved from a browser. Around one short article, it holds this:

Before: the text around the article in the saved page

Home
Products
Support
Your account
Contact us
This website uses cookies to improve your browsing experience. Accept all
cookies, or manage preferences.
Please enable JavaScript to view this page.
  … the article …
Related articles
Moving your licence to a new PC
Which file formats are supported
Was this article helpful? Rate it out of five.
Terms | Privacy | Cookie policy

Upload the page as it is, and all of that becomes knowledge. Cleaned with the RAG / Retrieval Corpus purpose, Agnos’s Cleaned documents export holds support-article.txt, which begins:

After: support-article.txt from Agnos

# Why an export stops at the first file

An export that writes one file and then stops is nearly always a queue that never drained. The counter is still above zero, so the writer waits for work that has already failed.

## Before you start

Note the job number from the review screen. You will need it twice, and it is the only thing that ties a run to the files it read.

## Steps

- Open the job and read the queue counter at the top of the panel.
- If the counter is above zero, press Stop and wait for it to reach zero.
…

The menu, the cookie banner, the notice, the sidebar and the footer links are gone. The headings, the four steps and the code block at the end of the article, including a < b, are kept. The same cleaning takes running headers, footers and page numbers out of PDFs; see the headers and footers guide.

Make the files with Agnos

  1. Start a project. In Projects, press New project and type a name. Check that the purpose is RAG / Retrieval Corpus, which suits documents an AI tool will search and answer from; if it is not, press Change and choose it. Press Create project.

  2. Add your documents. Drop the files, or a whole folder, on the Import step. Agnos reads text-based PDFs, Word, PowerPoint and Excel files, web pages, CSV, JSON and plain text.

  3. Look at what was removed. Open Review, choose a file and press Removed. Every removed piece names the rule that removed it.

  4. Export cleaned documents. Open Export, choose Cleaned documents and press Build and download.

  5. Unzip and upload. Upload the .txt files to your tool. Leave manifest.json out: it records what is in the export, for you rather than for the assistant.

The zip for the sample project, plus the handbook PDF from the other guides, held one text file per document:

northwind-documents_20260923_190359.zip
  faq.txt
  meeting-notes.txt
  price-list.txt
  staff-handbook.txt
  support-article.txt
  northwind-staff-handbook.txt
  manifest.json

Worth knowing

  • Each text file is named after its original document, so a citation points to a name you recognize.
  • Cleaned documents keeps every copy of text that appears in more than one document, because two documents that share a paragraph are still two documents. To keep only the first copy, set Text found in more than one file to Keep one copy on Export.
  • Upload one version of each document. An old and a new version side by side give the assistant two answers to choose from.
  • A spreadsheet becomes rows of text, one sheet after another. If the assistant has to calculate with the numbers, a tool that analyzes spreadsheets may do better with the original file.
  • If a tool limits how many files you can add, you can paste several text files into one, each starting with its document’s name. Agnos does not combine them for you.
  • Uploading sends the files to that company. Agnos cleans them on your computer, but it does not decide what is safe to share, so read them before you upload them.

Each tool’s limits

These come from each company’s own help pages, as of September 2026. They change, so check the linked page before you plan around a number.

Custom GPTs (ChatGPT)

  • Up to 20 files per GPT, each up to 512 MB, according to Creating and editing GPTs. OpenAI’s File Uploads FAQ gives 10 files per GPT, so check the builder.
  • Text and document files are capped at 2 million tokens each (File Uploads FAQ).
  • OpenAI said on 11 September 2026 that it plans to retire custom GPTs in favor of plugins, and a GPT’s knowledge files carry over as reference files (retirement FAQ). Personal accounts (Free, Go, Plus and Pro) can no longer create new GPTs; Business, Enterprise and Edu workspaces still can for now (Creating and editing GPTs). Clean files matter either way.
  • ChatGPT Projects take files too: up to 5 per project on Free, 25 on Go and Plus, and 40 on Edu, Pro, Business and Enterprise (File Uploads FAQ).

NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook)

Claude Projects

  • Project files can be up to 30 MB each. There is no fixed number of files, but together they must fit in Claude’s context window, and Claude reads only their text, apart from multimodal PDFs (Upload files to Claude).
  • On paid plans, when project knowledge nears that limit, Claude switches to retrieval (RAG) and can hold up to 10 times as much (What are projects?).
  • Accepted documents include TXT, PDF, DOCX, CSV, HTML and JSON.

Copilot (Microsoft)

Markdown (.md) is not on every list, but plain text is. The files Agnos exports are .txt.

Without Agnos

For a few documents, you can make clean text files by hand:

  • Word: choose File, Save As, and the Plain Text (.txt) type. Open the result and check it.
  • PDF: copy the text into Notepad, delete the header, footer and page-number lines, and save it as .txt.
  • Web page: open it in your browser’s reading view, if it has one, copy the article, and save it as .txt.

That is fine for a handful of files. For dozens it is slow, it is easy to miss a line or delete a real one, and nothing records what you took out.

Clean your knowledge files in one go

Try everything in Pro free for 14 days, with no card and no account. Agnos runs on Windows 10 and 11, and your documents never leave your computer.

Download the 14-day trial See pricing