Compatibility with macOS 10.15 Catalina, in particular, the app is now notarized as required by Apple.
PDFSpeech 1.7.1 Release Notes
Bug fix: In non-English language documents, some sentences were incorrectly skipped.
PDFSpeech 1.7 Release Notes
Fonts that were added to the ignored list (via the TTS menu → Add Selected Font to Ignored List) are now remembered and restored when the PDF is re-opened. For example, you may want to select sample header and footer text in a PDF and add it to the ignored list if you don't want certain headers and footers to be read out. Or, you may want to skip content that is formatted in a specific way on the PDF page such as text in callout boxes.
Selecting sentence by sentence: Use the < and > keys (actually the , and . keys since the SHIFT key is not required) to select the previous and next sentence respectively. Or, use the left and right arrow keys.
To start reading one sentence at a time, select a part of the sentence on the page, then hit K to read the sentence. Then hit L sequentially to read the next sentences.
To start reading continuously, either double-click on a word. Or, for more precision, select a few words of a sentence, then hit the / key to start continuous text to speech.
Jump to the last or most recent position read using text-to-speech in the current PDF using two new commands in TTS menu, Go to Furthest Sentence Read (CTRL CMD /) and Go to Most Recent Sentence Read (CMD /). These commands will only select the sentence, and will not start text-to-speech. Use the shortcut / to start TTS from the selected sentence.
Bug fix: Headers and footers are now more reliably skipped when walking through the pages using text-to-speech, one sentence at a time.
PDFSpeech 1.6 Release Notes
Read one sentence at a time: Use the keyboard shortcuts J-K-L to walk through the sentences on the page, one at a time. For PDFs that contain particularly dense material such as technical books, it may be useful to digest one sentence at a time.
Use K to read the current sentence.
Use L to read the next sentence.
Use J to read the previous sentence.
If you want to read ahead one sentence at a time from the top of the page, just keep hitting L. When you want to re-read what you just heard, hit K. Otherwise, step through the sentences using L.
To switch back from reading one sentence at a time to reading continuously, use TTS menu → Speak from Selected Text (shortcut SHFT CMD L). This will switch to continuous text to speech from the currently selected sentence on the page.
The keyboard shortcuts J-K-L are inspired by similar shortcuts used in video editing apps, to rewind, play, and fast forward through media respectively.
Bug fix: Single-letter keyboard shortcuts no longer generate a beep.
PDFSpeech 1.5.1 Release Notes
Bug fix for when punctuation was incorrectly stripped out.
PDFSpeech 1.5 Release Notes
Performance improvements when annotating, as changes to PDF are immediately saved to disk.
Use more TTS Voices: By default, PDFSpeech only displays a filtered list of TTS voices available on your macOS system. In particular, it only shows English TTS voices and excludes any stylistic or child voices. It does so to keep the list shown of a manageable length when you go to pick a TTS voice. However, you can now choose to see the complete list of TTS voices. This is especially important for users who would like to read non-English language documents in PDFSpeech.
To add more text to speech voices to your Mac, see the article "Change the voice your Mac uses to speak text" on support.apple.com The list of available TTS voices is shown ordered by locale, which are codes like "ko_KR" for Korean, and "de_DE" for German. These language locale codes are an international standard, with a reference list available on Wikipedia.
PDFSpeech 1.4 Release Notes
Shortcuts: Use the Tab key to pause and resume text-to-speech. The shortcut p also works for pause & resume, but the Tab key may be easier to tap with the left hand when using the mouse with the right hand to scroll pages and double-clicking to start reading.
Annotations: PDFSpeech is now an "Editor" of PDF files. It can now edit PDF files by adding highlight and underline annotations, and removing existing annotations.
To add a highlight, select text and hit H.
To add an underline, select text and hit U.
To remove a highlight or underline annotation, select all or even a part of the annotated text, and hit X.
The highlighting and underlining features are easy to employ while using TTS to read a book. With TTS, sentences are automatically highlighted as they are read, and using the H or U shortcut key without having to pause TTS makes it fluid to annotate text. The PDF file including annotations is saved automatically.
A handy reference of the available keyboard shortcuts is available from the "question" icon button on the bottom left of the PDFSpeech window.
PDFSpeech 1.3.1 Release Notes
Bug fix: When resetting the TTS voice to the system defaults, the speed was not being reset correctly in the app.
PDFSpeech 1.3 Release Notes
Load your PDF reading list into PDFSpeech a little bit easier by setting up a "Watched Folder". A dedicated "Recents" button on the top-left shows a list of the five most recently modified PDFs in the Watched Folder. By default, the user's Downloads folder is the Watched Folder. The folder is only "watched" when you click on the Recents button (shortcut CMD R), and thus may take a couple of seconds to populate the list if the folder has many files. Use File > Set Watched Folder... to customize.
Skip sentences and paragraphs based on specific fonts. Select text on the page that you want to skip, then use the new TTS menu > Add Selected Font to Skip List command. Similarly, if you change your mind, select text and use the TTS > Remove Selected Font to Skip List command. PDFSpeech will remember these instructions when you come back to the PDF.
As always, you can double-click on any word to start reading from that point. But now, you can also select text, and use the command TTS > Speak from Selected Text (shortcut SHFT CMD L).
A PopClip extension for PDFSpeech is available here (direct link to file of extension popclipext.zip) that allows you to select text in the PDF and invoke the "Speak from Selected Text" using your mouse.
The Preferences popover now provides two additional options to control the text-to-speech engine. Often, a PDF stores text inside a PDF in an order that doesn't match the expected left-to-right, top-to-bottom layout of text on the page. As such, when the PDF engine extracts the text from the PDF, it can be read out in an incorrect order. The new options in PDFSpeech Preferences attempt a workaround by sequencing text to match the visual layout.
Bug fixed: PDFSpeech's text-to-speech engine no longer gets stuck if a sentence has no pronounceable words.
The PDFSpeech User Guide (8MB PDF) has been updated with a Contents page, a What's New section, and internal hyperlinks.
PDFSpeech 1.2 Release Notes
Efficient note-taking while reading PDF books in PDFSpeech:
Support for PDFoo hyperlinks to take notes directly from PDFSpeech. Set up a PDFoo prefix for the current PDF in the popover, then use ⌘ Option click to get a precise link on the page, either as a rich text URL or a markdown URL.
PDFoo is available as a standalone purchase, or in a bundle with PDFSpeech and other apps.
New popover to customize text to speech settings within the app: both the speed (WPM) and the voice (only English voices shown). Or continue to use the system default TTS settings.