Can I import pdfs?

How To
1

Unfortunately pdf import isn’t supported by Readlang. I recommend you use some other software to convert it to plain text first. Two approaches are:

  1. (Small texts) Open the pdf in Chrome or Adobe Reader, select all the relevant text and copy it. Then paste it into the Readlang Upload Page
  2. (Long texts) Install Calibre, use this to convert the .pdf file to .txt and then import the .txt file into Readlang.
1 Like
2

Does anyone have any experience with this? When I try to use calibre to convert pdf to txt, the output file has a null length and calibre informs that the conversion has crashed…

3

What I do is Ctrl-A / Ctrl-C to copy all the text into MS Word. Then do a find replace on all paragraph break special chars…replacing them with a space. Then Ctrl-A / Ctrl-C all the text and paste into Readlang. Works pretty well for me.
Occasionally you may have to do some additional cleaning - for example if headers / footers are repeated but generally it’s very quick.

4

Thanks for your suggestion. This would work for short or incidental texts. However, I am often reading texts which are hundreds of pages long which would make this a very tedious and impracticable process.

1 Like
5

If you are on Linux or Mac then you can use pdftotext via the commandline. I prefer it to Calibre since sometimes I get strange behavior with Calibre as you noted. On windows you can probably install it via WSL, not sure if there are native window binaries for it.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/pdftotext

6

It probably doesn’t answer your query about longer PDFs (I can’t find a limit), but for those interested in re-formatting shorter PDFs, YouTube transcriptions, etc, I use TextFixer, a free online suite of text tools, that includes a line-break remover. I simply copy and paste the text into TextFixer, and from there into ReadLang:

TextFixer Line-break remover

1 Like
7

Hello Steve, Is there any possibility to import PDF with picture? I have a lot of scientist text with I need to read and for their understanding I also need included picture. Please help.

PS Readlang is great.

2 Likes
8

Sorry, there’s no way to do this at the moment. Not impossible that I add this in future but no promises.

9

Thank you for your response. Please consider it. There are many technical ebooks which contain pictures and charts. And your app with AI and dictionary can really help to learn technical terms.

2 Likes