Can antigravity support native multimodal reading of PDFs, like in AIstudio and Gemini Cli?

Google Antigravity
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This feature will be very useful, reading some documents and papers.

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Hello @yi_ren, Google Antigravity supports native multimodal reading of PDFs. In Antigravity, PDF support is integrated directly into the workspace file system. This allows the agent to treat PDFs as part of your project’s codebase or documentation. The feature provides multimodal reasoning and structured extraction.
To enable an agent to read a PDF in Antigravity, you could follow these steps:

  1. Upload to Workspace: The PDF must be uploaded to your project’s file tree (the “Explorer” view).

  2. Trusted Folders: You must place the PDF in a folder that has trusted permissions. Antigravity uses a security model where agents cannot read files in untrusted directories by default. Once the folder is trusted, the agent can “see” and analyze the document.

  3. Agent Interaction: You can then reference the file in your natural language prompts.

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It seems that gemini will often refuse to use the view_file tool to read academic pdfs. However, when it actually does read the pdfs, it does surprisingly well.

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I noticed that when gemini uses view_file on pdfs, it works fine, but opus 4.5 always fails to read pdfs with view_file. Is this a limitation of the model? Do the different models have different tooling? Or maybe opus calls the tool incorrectly somehow? Due to Opus’s limitations with pdfs, I was assuming Antigravity did not have tooling for reading pdfs until I found the helpful reply by @Abhijit_Pramanik above.

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Oh my, I’m experiencing the exact same issue. In my tests, using the instruction “use view_file tool to read pdf” works with Gemini, but for Claude it shows “view_file cannot read pdf files.” I suspect antigravity didn’t specify this capability when configuring the Claude model. Hope Google fixes this. Glad to see someone else pinpointed the same problem.:handshake:

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We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. I have also encountered this issue with the Claude model and have shared my findings with the engineering team for further review. If you have any logs or images that further document this behavior, please share them here—your input will be invaluable to our investigation.

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Same issue - Opus cannot read the pdf. I took screenshots as a workaround but it’s imperfect

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I added this in agent rules globally. Works like charm:
rule name: pdf-reading
context: Always use the view_file tool to read academic pdfs. Don’t use any python lib.

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