I wrote Read My PDF to read my pdf
Because, first, I can, and second, it would be lovely for something like that to exist.
After a long while of working with dirt, I have this hankering for some technical voyage. Coincidentally, I like reading books and some of them are just not available in sound format. Also, as a lazy bastard, I’d prefer to have someone do it for me, but it seems the times are not great for cool people doing cool projects ughhhg
So, I’ve decided to write one for my own use, and here it is Read-my-pdf.
I built this thing with Flask, something I’ve always loved and my go-to choice for developing web apps and APIs.
For the front end, I chose to do it with Tailwind CSS this time. It’s been quite dreadful for me working with CSS, but this Tailwind thing is a fresh breeze. Freaking love this!
The most important part is the PDF reading engine. This is from StyleTTS2. This Text to Speech engine is very impressive, creating natural, nuanced speech. Those guys are doing an incredible job. It’s awesome engineering.
For features, I’ve always wanted to rewind the sentences, instead of rewinding the last whatever 10 seconds. This kind of feature is only possible now, with the advent of great TTS technology.
Demo video: youtube.com/watch?v=t47Qmd5ZecY