# Conversations and Citations

Once a document has finished processing, you can ask it questions directly instead of
reading it start to finish. This page covers how to ask a question in the Keyline app, how
to read the answer, and how to trace an answer back to its source page. The
[Keyline API](/docs/keyline/api-quickstart) returns the same answers and references for
your own interface to render.

## Asking a question

Open a document's page view in the app and type a question into the conversation panel. You can ask
about a specific detail, a figure or table, or something that spans several pages. Keyline
keeps the conversation history for the document, so you can ask a follow-up question
without repeating context.

## Reading citation-backed answers

Every answer carries numbered citations, and each one resolves to a single block of the
document: a paragraph, a figure, a table, or an equation. A citation gives you the page
number and a cropped image of that block, so you verify the claim against the original
artwork in seconds. That matters most for technical or numerical details, where the answer
lives inside a figure or a table.

## Following a citation back to the source

Select a citation in an answer to jump straight to the page it references in the
[PDF view](/docs/keyline/reading-pdfs). This closes the loop between an answer and the
document it came from, so you always know exactly where information originated.