Settings

All settings live under pdfCaseReview.*. Unless noted, they have resource scope, so a workspace or folder can override them.

Categories

Setting	Default	Meaning
pdfCaseReview.categories	Fact, Financial, Strategic implication, Concern, Question	The highlight palette for new documents. Each entry needs a unique id (lowercase letters, digits, dashes), a name and a unique #RRGGBB color; the color is how the viewer tells categories apart. An invalid setting falls back to the defaults with a warning. Categories are copied into each document's sidecar when it is created, so changing the setting does not alter existing documents.
pdfCaseReview.categoryPresets	{}	Extra palettes for Apply Category Preset, keyed by name; Business case, Academic paper and Contract are built in. Same item shape as categories. window scope.

Storage

Setting	Default	Meaning
pdfCaseReview.sidecar.location	beside	Where highlights and notes are stored. beside: case.pdf.review.json next to the PDF. folder: <workspace>/.pdf-case-review/<relative path>.review.json, which keeps them out of directories you do not control. A PDF outside the workspace always gets its file beside it. Changing this does not move existing files.
pdfCaseReview.pdf.embedOnSave	true	On save, rewrite an unencrypted PDF so the highlights become real annotations that other readers show (the sidecar stays canonical). Publisher-protected PDFs are never modified regardless. Turn off to keep PDFs byte-identical, for example when they are committed to git.

Highlights view

Setting	Default	Meaning
pdfCaseReview.highlights.groupBy	category	Whether the Highlights view groups rows by category (palette order) or by page (reading order). The view's title buttons toggle it. window scope.

Report

Setting	Default	Meaning
pdfCaseReview.report.defaultFormat	ask	Format for Generate Report (Ctrl+Alt+R): ask shows a picker; markdown, docx or pdf render immediately.
pdfCaseReview.report.organization	none	Grouped sections added after the chronological notes: none (notes appear once, in the order they were taken), category, page, or both (category sections plus a reading-order appendix). Reports always open with the chronological notes and close with the AI summary; cached AI page contexts render above their pages' entries in every organization.
pdfCaseReview.report.outputFolder	""	Where reports are written. Empty writes beside the PDF; a relative path is resolved against the workspace folder. Ignored in untrusted workspaces.
pdfCaseReview.report.quoteMaxChars	0	Longest quoted passage. 0 keeps every highlight whole; a positive number truncates at a word boundary with an ellipsis.
pdfCaseReview.report.author	""	Author line in the title block; empty omits it.
pdfCaseReview.report.includeEmptyCategories	false	Show categories with no highlights in the summary table and body.
pdfCaseReview.report.usePageLabels	true	Cite the PDF's own page labels when they differ from page numbers, as p. iv [4].
pdfCaseReview.report.overwrite	false	Overwrite an existing <name>.review.<ext>; off writes a numbered copy.

AI (optional, off by default)

Nothing leaves your machine unless a provider is enabled or you copy the prompt yourself. By default the summary commands send your highlights, notes and text extracted from the document; set ai.contextScope to notes to keep the PDF's text on this machine. The PDF file itself is never sent under either scope. Every run passes the eligibility question naming the signed-in account. While a PDF is active in a trusted workspace, an AI status bar item shows the provider and the account the document would run under; clicking it opens the provider picker (see commands). See the AI reviewer how-to.

Setting	Default	Meaning
pdfCaseReview.ai.provider	off	off, claude-cli (spawns claude) or codex-cli (spawns codex). CLI providers need desktop VS Code and a trusted workspace.
pdfCaseReview.ai.model	""	Model passed to the CLI (--model); empty uses the CLI's default.
pdfCaseReview.ai.includeInReport	true	Include the cached AI summary as a labeled, grey-italics section of generated reports.
pdfCaseReview.ai.maxWords	500	Word budget for the executive summary.
pdfCaseReview.ai.contextScope	document-text	What AI features may send. document-text (the default): Summarize with AI and Copy Summary Prompt send highlights, notes and the document text, extracted per page with citations under a 400,000-character budget (truncation is reported explicitly), so a summary works before any notes exist. notes: highlights and notes only; the PDF's text stays on this machine. Image-only pages and scans have no extractable text and are excluded; the PDF file itself is never sent under either scope. Widening the scope re-asks the consent question, and the dialog states exactly what will be sent with coverage numbers. Add AI Page Context always sends notes only.
pdfCaseReview.ai.reviewPrompt	true	Summarize with AI opens the assembled prompt in an editor tab before sending it, with a word and token estimate; edit the tab and press Send, and the provider receives exactly what the tab contains. The reply opens in a tab beside it. The last 20 prompt and output files are kept in the extension's global storage.
pdfCaseReview.ai.pageContext.minHighlights	4	Add AI Page Context offers pages with at least this many highlights where fewer than half carry notes.
pdfCaseReview.ai.requiredAccount	[]	Rules refusing the AI step under the wrong login. The first rule whose when matches (protected, authorizationLineMatches, pathGlob) applies; email names the account that must be signed in (no override) and use selects the ai.accounts entry with that id for the active provider. Leave email off a rule with use when the logins registered under that id have different addresses.
pdfCaseReview.ai.accounts	[]	Separate CLI login directories ({id, provider, configDir}) for people with more than one account; the extension sets CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR / CODEX_HOME on the spawned CLI itself. An id is unique per provider, not globally: the same id may appear once for claude-cli and once for codex-cli, and a rule's use picks the entry for the active pdfCaseReview.ai.provider, so switching the provider switches the login directory with it. A matched rule whose id has no entry for the active provider is refused with an error naming the fix (its Add an AI Account... button opens the guided flow with provider and id preset); an id unknown to every provider is refused as a configuration error. A repeated (id, provider) pair warns and the first entry wins. The gate and the spawn share one lookup, so a run can never execute under a different CLI or login than the one the consent dialog verified.
pdfCaseReview.ai.requireVerifiedAccountForProtected	true	Refuse CLI providers on publisher-protected documents when the login cannot be verified from the CLI's saved credentials; the manual clipboard path asks for an extra acknowledgment instead.

Viewer

Setting	Default	Meaning
pdfCaseReview.viewer.defaultZoom	auto	Zoom when a PDF opens: auto, page-actual, page-fit, page-width or a percentage.
pdfCaseReview.viewer.sidebarOnLoad	0	PDF.js sidebar panel to show on open: -1 restore previous, 0 none, 1 thumbnails, 2 outline, 3 attachments, 4 layers.
pdfCaseReview.viewer.maxCanvasPixels	0	Largest canvas area (in pixels) a page may render at; larger pages render at reduced resolution. 0 keeps the PDF.js default. Lower it on memory-constrained machines for very large documents; applies when the PDF is reopened. See very large PDFs.
pdfCaseReview.viewer.maxImageSize	0	Largest decoded image (width times height, in pixels); larger images are skipped. 0 keeps the PDF.js default (no limit). Applies when the PDF is reopened.
pdfCaseReview.viewer.retainContextWhenHidden	true	Keep the viewer alive while its tab is hidden, so switching back is instant. Turn off to free renderer memory for hidden tabs; the viewer then reloads (highlights intact) when shown again. window scope; takes effect after reloading the window.