A PDF is the hardest thing to hear well. The text runs in columns, breaks across pages, and carries page numbers, headers and footnote marks a person would never read aloud.
Bring the PDF in
- In Files, Mail or Safari, tap Share and pick Aloudeo.
- Or open Aloudeo, tap +, choose Import files and books and pick the file.
The PDF lands in your Papers or Documents folder, and the voice starts when you press play.
Hear the text, skip the page furniture
The voice reads the words in order and leaves out what only the printed page needs:
- page numbers and running headers
- footnote marks and daggers stuck to words
- citation brackets and author-year citations in papers
- links and email addresses
Formulas and tables carry no sentence to say, so the voice moves on to the next paragraph.
Follow along
The sentence you hear lights up violet on the page. Tap any sentence to jump there, or open the chapter list to jump to a section of a long report.
Scanned PDFs
When a page holds only an image, your iPhone reads the text off it first, on the phone. Printed pages read well. Handwriting, stamps and faint photocopies can come out wrong.
Where it stops
- PDFs locked with a password stay locked until you open them.
- A page that is one big image with tiny text can read slowly or in the wrong order.
- Complex layouts, like magazines with many boxes, can jump between columns.