Listen to a PDF with LeafRead. Open a text-based PDF, choose a sentence and follow along as the text is read aloud.
A quiet moment can turn a page into a place to think.
One paragraph. A slower breath. A thought you might have hurried past.
You don’t have to finish everything today. There is something good about simply beginning.
A report or long article in PDF format can take more than one sitting to finish. LeafRead lets you read its extracted text, listen with text to speech and return to the sentence you stopped at. You can keep the original PDF available when you need to check a chart or a page reference.
The listening view works with the document’s words. It is most useful for continuous text such as an essay, a report or a manual. When a page is mainly diagrams, equations or a complex table, refer to the original as well: spoken text alone will not explain its visual structure.
Open the PDF in your usual viewer and try selecting a paragraph. Copy it into a text field and check whether the words appear in a sensible order. This simple check helps distinguish a document with a usable text layer from a scan containing only page images.
Sign in to LeafRead, choose Add text and upload the PDF. The web reader accepts text-based PDFs up to 20 MB and 300 pages. After import, open the saved reading and check the first paragraphs before starting audio. The original file remains available from the reading.
You do not need to begin at the cover or listen through introductory material every time. Select a sentence in the reading and press Play. The highlight follows the spoken sentence, giving you a visible reference when you want to read along or pause to look at the text.
Try a paragraph from the main body of the PDF first. Listen for misplaced headers or text from a neighboring column. If something sounds out of order, inspect the extracted words before continuing. A well-ordered reading is more useful than a faster playback speed.
Set a speed that suits the subject. A familiar report may be comfortable at a quicker pace, while an unfamiliar explanation may deserve slower listening and occasional replays. Pause when you need to compare the spoken text with a figure in the original file.
Save a highlight or add a note when you find something worth returning to. For example, keep the conclusion of a report with a note about the question you want to raise. LeafRead saves your reading position so you can finish the document in several sessions.
A scanned PDF without a text layer cannot be read as ordinary text by the web importer. Use a version with selectable text or apply OCR in another tool before importing it. Check the recognized words, especially names and numbers, because recognition can introduce mistakes.
Even selectable text may have an awkward order in multi-column pages. Repeated headers, footnotes and tables can interrupt a passage. If the imported result is not usable, try a simpler source edition or paste the relevant text you are allowed to use. LeafRead does not offer PDF crop or region-order editing in the web reader.
Use the LeafRead app to open supported documents from Files or the share sheet. With the same account, you can also find PDFs you added on the web. Start listening from a sentence and use the Lock Screen controls when you want to put the screen away.
For listening without internet, prepare and download the audio in your chosen voice before you leave. Downloaded text is not the same as downloaded audio. Check the completed downloads on that device and try a short offline passage before planning a long session.
Yes. The current free allowance includes 350,000 newly generated characters per account per UTC day, shared by the web and app. Replaying cached audio does not consume new characters. Settings shows the remaining allowance and when it resets.
The highlight follows the sentence being spoken, not individual words. You can use it to locate your place, pause and read the passage again. The reading position is tied to the extracted text rather than the PDF’s printed page numbers.
Text to speech reads the available extracted words. It does not create descriptions of diagrams or interpret the relationships in a complex table. Keep the original PDF open when those elements are needed to understand the document.
An article, a book or a document. Keep it in your library.
