Troubleshooting

When the overlay does not appear, PDFs do not work, or a gist is wrong.

  1. No overlay appears when I click Gist

    Three causes handle almost every case — wrong icon, unsupported page, wedged extension. Fix path inside.

    1 min read · Updated 2026-04-19

  2. The Gist is cut off or wrong

    Truncated or off-target Gists almost always mean the source was partial, dynamic, or outside the first-class content types. Try /try with the full text as the cleanest fallback.

    2 min read · Updated 2026-04-19

  3. PDF not working

    PDFs with a real text layer work great. Scanned-image PDFs are hit or miss — Gist reads the pages as images. Protected and very large PDFs are the other common failure modes.

    2 min read · Updated 2026-04-24

  4. Google Docs not working

    Google Docs is a best-effort path. Clean link-viewable docs work. Gated or heavily-formatted docs don't. Paste into /try as the cleanest fallback.

    1 min read · Updated 2026-04-24

  5. YouTube quality — when a video Gist feels off

    Gist works from the words, not the pictures. A clean transcript gives the best Gist; with no captions it falls back to the title and description, so quality varies.

    1 min read · Updated 2026-04-19