# Read PDF Aloud Online - Text to Speech with Highlighting

> Listen to a PDF read aloud sentence by sentence, highlighted in the text and on the page. Choose voices and speed, click to jump, and resume later.

- URL: https://qilingtools.com/en/pdf/read-aloud
- Category: PDF Tools (https://qilingtools.com/en/pdf)
- Tags: [PDF](https://qilingtools.com/en/tags/pdf), [Audio](https://qilingtools.com/en/tags/audio)
- Last updated: 2026-10-26
- Price: Free, no sign-up
- Privacy: Runs locally in the browser; files are never uploaded

Tired eyes, or want to get through a report, paper or e-book while doing something else? This tool reads PDFs to you. It reads the position and size of every line, rebuilds paragraphs in reading order (rejoining words hyphenated across lines), can drop headers, footers and page numbers, then splits the text into sentences using Chinese and English punctuation — recognising abbreviations such as Mr. and e.g., initials and decimals that don’t end a sentence — and breaks very long sentences at commas, which avoids Chrome’s habit of cutting off long utterances. While playing, the current sentence is highlighted both in the text view and on the rendered PDF page; you can pause, skip back or forward, or click any sentence to start from there. Chinese and English sentences automatically use a voice of the matching language, speed and pitch are adjustable, a sleep timer stops after a set time or at the end of the page, and your position in each file is remembered locally so you can pick up where you left off. You can also paste plain text instead.

## How to use

1. Upload a PDF with a text layer, or switch to Paste text
2. Choose the Chinese and English voices, speed, pitch and sleep timer
3. Press Play, or click any sentence to start listening from there

## Features

- Paragraphs and sentences in reading order
- Current sentence highlighted in text and on the page
- Automatic Chinese / English voice switching
- Pause, previous, next and click-to-jump
- Optional header, footer and page-number skipping
- Sleep timer (minutes or end of page)
- Remembers your position per file
- Runs locally, nothing uploaded

## FAQ

### Why is there no sound, or only one voice?

Speech comes from your browser’s built-in synthesis (Web Speech API), so the available voices depend on your OS and browser. Edge has excellent online “Natural” voices, Chrome has Google voices, and macOS / iOS let you download more Chinese and English voices in system settings.

### Can I export the speech as MP3?

No. Browser speech synthesis only plays audio and never exposes the sound data, so there is nothing to download; use a system audio or screen recorder if you need a file.

### The reading order is wrong or it reads headers and page numbers

Multi-column layouts and PDFs with many text boxes can jump around. Tick Skip headers, footers and page numbers to drop repeated lines, or click the right sentence to continue from there. Scans have no text layer — run them through Scanned PDF OCR first.

### Is my file uploaded? Where is my position saved?

Nothing is uploaded; the PDF is only read in your browser. Your reading position is stored in this browser’s local storage, so it resets on another device or after clearing browsing data.

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