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PDFSpeech Tip: Convert an EPUB Book into PDF

2/27/2017

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Nowadays EPUB is a common document format since it's well-suited for display on mobile devices. In order to use EPUBs with PDFSpeech, these documents have to be converted to PDFs. There are many OS X apps which can do this however in general I've found the quality of conversion quite poor, in terms of adequate page margins, and re-sizing of images to fit the PDF page.

In my experience, the best app for EPUB to PDF conversion is Clearview, available on the Mac App Store, priced at $10.

While it has useful settings to control line height, page margins and text zoom, a very interesting feature is that even as an EPUB reader, it actually displays the PDF equivalent of the EPUB! When you resize the window, the dimensions of the PDF page change too (similar to the behavior of the Insert Clipboard Contents window in PDFSpeech to make single-page PDFs.) Unlike other EPUB readers, in Clearview, the PDF you can export is identical to what you see on screen. Furthermore, Clearview's PDF export replicates the table of contents from the EPUB, making the PDF also easy to navigate within PDFSpeech.
Use Clearview app to convert EPUB to PDF with table of contents.
Clearview for macOS is excellent for converting EPUBs into PDFs - what you see is what you get in terms of PDF output.
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PDFSpeech Tip: Print to PDF with Custom Page Sizes

2/26/2017

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PDFSpeech can be configured as a target to receive PDFs that are printed from any app on macOS. When we print as PDF, we don't usually pause to consider what the print output should look like. The below figure shows a web page being printed from Safari. The default view will require 21 pages in the PDF. By switching to Reader mode in Safari, we get a cleaner view of the web page will extraneous elements removed, and the page count is reduced to 19 pages. However, in the last example, the page size has been reduced to 4 pages by specifying a custom page size, in this case a page size of 12 inch x 80 inch (width x height.) Since we don't intend to print these PDFs on actual paper, using such virtual paper sizes is entirely driven by whether or not the PDF looks good & functions great in the PDF reading apps we use.
​
Shows the benefits of using Safari's Reader View and a large paper size to create readable PDFs with fewer pages.

Benefits of Long Pages: PDFSpeech highlights sentences as it reads them, and long pages allow the highlighting to proceed smoothly down the page. The default page sizes such as Letter and A4 when used for printing to PDF can often lead to text content separated from the figures due to page breaks. Overall, readability is significantly improved by using long pages.

Indeed, I use three custom page sizes for printing PDFs into PDFSpeech, depending on how much content is to be printed on a page since long pages will have lots of whitespace if the content is insufficient:
  • Long page size: 12 x 80 inch
  • Half page size: 12 x 40 inch
  • Quarter page size: 12 x 20 inch

Custom Paper Sizes can be selected in the Paper Size dropdown in the Print dialog. And in this dropdown, you can also create new custom paper sizes. In this example, looking at the page preview on the left, the content can likely be fit on the Half Large page preset. In this way, you can choose a paper size for the content that both looks neat & works great in the PDFSpeech app.

How to set up custom paper sizes in macOS.
The Print to PDF dialog in Safari. Use the PDF menu on the bottom left to send the printed PDF directly to PDFSpeech.
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Text-to-Speech (TTS) makes reading "easy"

2/23/2017

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​PDFSpeech provides an autopilot mode to help you read anything. It adds momentum to the static page, and engages both your eyes & ears to advance you gently through the content, at a steady pace. You can start anywhere in the document, and stop at any time. PDFSpeech makes it easy to speed up to browse documents, and easy to slow down to study. You control the speed, and you can simply have it read again whatever requires a second attempt for better understanding.

I’ve personally had a lot of success with text-to-speech (TTS), even for reading dense textbooks! Recently, I read the book “Data Science for Business” of around 400 pages, on the Safari Books Online library. At that time, PDFSpeech didn’t exist, and I had to incrementally select text on the web page, then hit a keyboard shortcut for the “speak selected text” command built into macOS. The tedium was reduced a lot by using PopClip, which allowed me to select text with the mouse, and then immediately click the “say” command in a convenient popover placed right under the mouse. I was genuinely surprised by the ease with which I was able to “read” a textbook for long stretches of time, marching steadily through the book. The fact that text-to-speech technology significantly cut the effort & willpower required to read a textbook from cover to cover is absolutely amazing. That’s where the idea of PDFSpeech was born - with the objective of reducing even further the friction involved in reading a book using TTS technology.
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Introducing PDFSpeech for macOS

2/23/2017

 
PDFSpeech is an OS X application that leverages text-to-speech technology to help you tame your reading list.

​PDFSpeech will help you read more. It taps into text-to-speech (TTS) technology built into macOS to help you zip through PDFs. With great tools at hand, you’ll look forward to reading a book cover to cover, and even read an entire chapter in one sitting. PDFSpeech strives to banish the effort involved in reading, and it adds invaluable momentum to help you complete your biggest reading tasks.

​​PDFSpeech offers:
  • Intuitive controls: Double-click any word in the PDF Document to start text-to-speech from that point forward. Double-click in whitespace or margins to stop.
  • Create PDFs from your content: Bring in rich text content on the clipboard, or just a few pages selected from the Preview app. It's easy to get started with any of your content.
  • Build PDF Packs for Organized Reading: Automatically appends PDFs, creates internal table-of-contents to aid in navigation, automatically saves to disk. Quickly convert your reading list into a PDF Pack.
  • Print to PDFSpeech from any app: Supports printing to PDF from any macOS app including Safari's awesome Reader view for clutter-free web pages, or reports from Microsoft Word.
  • Listener-friendly design: Smartly avoids reading header & footer text, and has a Fast Skip mode that only reads sentences at start & end of paragraphs which is great when you’re only skimming to grab the big picture,
  • Customizable TTS engine: Provide custom word mappings to guide the TTS engine, so it doesn't mispronounce the same words over & over, and get on your nerves! 

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Requires OS X 10.7 or later.
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Buy and download PDFSpeech on the Mac App Store

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