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I tried previous suggestion to have my MacBook to read PDFs with speech. I tried Edit -> start speaking in Preview. I also tried the regular way of of using a shortcut key preset in System Preferences for a highlighted section. Nothing happens.

I checked to make sure it reads using other documents and/or screen text.

My eyes need a break and I would like to get speech to read aloud the PDFs. What other suggestions do you have?

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5 Answers 5

Reset to default
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Preview voice reading will happen after selecting the text you require to be read first / as mentioned above it needs to be selectable and recognisable text - then proceed with previous steps: Edit -> Speech -> Start Reading

Hope this helps

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  • How do you speed it up?
    – Yzmir Ramirez
    Commented Jul 14, 2019 at 5:04
  • System Preferences ... / Accessibility / Speech. Change Speaking Rate and System Voice if want.
    – Yzmir Ramirez
    Commented Jul 14, 2019 at 6:08
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A command line solution:

  1. Install homebrew. See https://docs.brew.sh/Installation for details.

  2. Launch Terminal and run:

    brew install xpdf
pdftotext file.pdf - | iconv -t UTF-8//IGNORE | say
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  • XPDF command line tools can be installed without brew, FWIW. xpdfreader.com/download.html
    – benwiggy
    Commented May 30, 2022 at 7:56
  • If xpdf is not installed, then an alternative to xpdf would be brew install poppler. Poppler also installs pdftotext utility.
    – marc-medley
    Commented Oct 24, 2022 at 22:32
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I use Read2Text application, to copy/paste pdf encoded text into it and it reads my files. It's a hassle to copy pages and pages into it, but for now as mac read won't do this, this is what i do, and it does the job.

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  • Welcome to Ask Different and thank you for your answer. If possible, could you edit your answer (there's an edit link below it) to also include a link to the Read2Text application you use? This will avoid any ambiguity in the event there are similarly named apps (either now or in future).
    – Monomeeth ♦
    Commented Mar 18, 2017 at 7:57
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For me, the speech > start speaking feature only worked when I selected all the text in the PDF (cmd + A) first.

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VoiceOver can only read PDFs that are actually text-encoded. If they are simply image files, it has nothing to "read." You can use Acrobat Pro or another PDF application like Abbyy FineReader or ReadIRIS with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to "read" the graphics and convert them to text. Then you can use VoiceOver to speak if for you. OCR isn't perfect, but it's enough where you'll be able to understand it.

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