PDF to Speech

A tiny Python script (main.py) that opens a file picker, lets you choose a PDF file, and reads the text out loud using your system TTS engine.

This repository contains a single script that demonstrates a simple PDF-to-speech utility using PyPDF2 to extract text and pyttsx3 for text-to-speech.

What this does

• Opens a file dialog to select a PDF file.
• Extracts text from each page using PyPDF2.
• Speaks each page's extracted text using pyttsx3.

The core logic lives in main.py:

• Uses tkinter.filedialog.askopenfilename() to let you pick a PDF.
• Uses PyPDF2.PdfReader to read pages and page.extract_text() to get text.
• Uses pyttsx3 to speak the extracted text.

Requirements

• Python 3.7+ (tested on Windows)
• The following Python packages:
  • pyttsx3
  • PyPDF2

Note: tkinter is part of the standard library on most official Python builds for Windows; if you used a minimal or custom build that lacks tkinter, install a Python distribution that includes it.

Install

Open PowerShell and run:

pip install pyttsx3 PyPDF2

(If you use a virtual environment, activate it first.)

Usage

Run the script from the project folder:

python main.py

A file selection dialog will open. Choose a PDF file. The script will extract text page-by-page and speak it aloud.

Stopping the script:

• You can stop the reading by focusing the terminal and pressing Ctrl+C.
• Closing the terminal or stopping Python will halt the speech.

Limitations & Notes

• Text extraction depends on the PDF contents. If a PDF contains scanned pages (images), PyPDF2's extract_text() will likely return None or empty strings; in that case you need OCR (for example using pytesseract) to extract text from images.

• The script does not currently handle errors such as selecting a non-PDF file, missing read permissions, or a canceled file dialog. Consider adding try/except blocks and basic validation.

• pyttsx3 uses your platform's TTS backend (SAPI5 on Windows). If you want different voices or to adjust rate/volume, you can modify the script to set properties on the engine (see pyttsx3 docs). Example:

engine = pyttsx3.init()
engine.setProperty('rate', 150)  # words per minute
voices = engine.getProperty('voices')
engine.setProperty('voice', voices[0].id)  # choose a voice

Suggested Improvements

• Add CLI options to choose file path from the command line (for automation) and to adjust TTS voice/rate/volume.
• Add error handling for file selection failures and PDF read errors.
• Support OCR fallback (using pytesseract) for scanned PDFs.
• Provide a simple GUI with play/pause/stop controls instead of blocking the terminal.

Example main.py (current)

The current main.py is small and looks like this:

import pyttsx3
from PyPDF2 import PdfReader
from tkinter.filedialog import askopenfilename

book = askopenfilename()

pdfreader = PdfReader(book)
pages = len(pdfreader.pages)

player = pyttsx3.init()

for num in range(pages):
    page = pdfreader.pages[num]
    text = page.extract_text()
    if text:
        player.say(text)
        player.runAndWait()

License

This README and any added small scripts are provided under the MIT License. If you want a different license, let me know and I can update it.

Contact / Next steps

If you want, I can:

• Add argument parsing so files can be passed on the command line.
• Add error handling and a small requirements.txt.
• Add an example showing how to change voice settings or save speech to audio file.

Tell me which of the above you'd like next and I'll implement it.