I love audiobooks, but the selection is always a little thin — half the things I actually want to read only exist as PDFs. So I built Read My PDF: point it at a PDF and it reads the thing out loud to you.

What’s under the hood

• Flask for the backend — my ol’ reliable for web apps and APIs.
• Tailwind CSS on the front end. CSS usually fills me with dread; Tailwind turned out to be a fresh breeze.
• espeak-ng + phonemizer doing the text-to-speech.

The good bits

The reading page is an infinite scroll of the text — click the speaker button on any sentence and it reads from there. The feature I always wanted: rewind by sentence, not by “the last 10 seconds”. Modern TTS finally makes that feel natural.

Try it

• Code → github.com/VuongNM/readmypdf
• Demo video → youtube.com/watch?v=t47Qmd5ZecY

Install espeak-ng (use MacPorts if you’re on an M1 — Homebrew installs it for the wrong architecture), pip install -r ./requirement.txt, then flask --app app.py --debug run. Still early days — next up is cleanup and documentation.