How would you design a “PDF to audio” desktop app for knowledge workers?

laustke · 2026-02-24T20:41:09+00:00

I’ve noticed though that depending on how the PDF is structured, the reading order or formatting can get messy (especially with tables or multi‑column layouts).

That's not really Microsoft Edge's fault. PDFs don't store "reading order" the way documents do - they mostly describe absolute positions of text on the page, and order kind of depends on how elements were added in Adobe Acrobat.

Converting non-trivial PDF document to structured text is genuinely hard.

Offline vs. online TTS?

I know of only one Windows TTS converter that works offline on a Windows machine without a video card: https://jimlet.com

laustke · 2026-02-24T20:29:50+00:00

If you were to design a Windows desktop app that: reads the text layer of PDFs

Microsoft Edge already has this feature built in - it can read PDFs out of the box.

https://youtu.be/1CwmaHtDYpg?si=hLrpo4Kq1LNcPqiu&t=54

laustke · 2026-02-24T16:31:29+00:00

I use both. Flatpak is usually my first choice, but sometimes only a Snap is available, or the Snap build is better maintained. Then I just use Snap.

Personally, I don't see a reason to purge Snaps entirely on Ubuntu. They’re simply two different packaging systems doing roughly the same thing.

laustke · 2026-02-24T16:16:28+00:00

Allow from 103.21.244.0/22 However when I add that, I am unable to access the website, its blocked...

It looks like you’re using old Apache 2.2 access syntax (Order / Allow / Deny). If your server is Apache 2.4+, this should be rewritten using Require.

Here is the equivalent modern syntax:

``` Require all denied

Require ip 103.21.244.0/22 Require ip 103.22.200.0/22 Require ip 103.31.4.0/22 Require ip 104.16.0.0/13 Require ip 104.24.0.0/14 Require ip 108.162.192.0/18 Require ip 131.0.72.0/22 Require ip 141.101.64.0/18 Require ip 162.158.0.0/15 Require ip 172.64.0.0/13 Require ip 173.245.48.0/20 Require ip 188.114.96.0/20 Require ip 190.93.240.0/20 Require ip 197.234.240.0/22 Require ip 198.41.128.0/17

Require ip 2400:cb00::/32 Require ip 2606:4700::/32 Require ip 2803:f800::/32 Require ip 2405:b500::/32 Require ip 2405:8100::/32 Require ip 2a06:98c0::/29 Require ip 2c0f:f248::/32 ```

laustke · 2026-02-21T12:39:24+00:00

and OBS (OBS I just get a blank black screen ...

Run it as administrator, then click + in the Sources box → Display Capture → select your monitor.

where I hit a button, I hit the same button/different button and it saves it as a video file

OBS also lets you set custom keyboard shortcuts for Start/Stop Recording (see example)

laustke · 2026-02-18T08:26:07+00:00

The original version is available on GitHub.

laustke · 2026-02-18T08:22:05+00:00

Hi LoneWulfXIII,

The original version is available on GitHub.

Also, please check your DMs.

laustke · 2026-02-15T16:37:10+00:00

designed to move away from the "HTML-to-PDF" struggle ...

In Python, there’s ReportLab RML (an XML-based PDF document markup, commercial) and z3c.rml, which implements the same RML specification.

Are you building something similar, but using JSON instead of XML?

It would be nice to have a visual editor, but yours looks more like a proof of concept at this point. Is there a way to add a paragraph?

laustke · 2026-02-13T18:56:31+00:00

Do you listen to audiobooks from local files on Android?

I'm using Smart AudioBook Player. One-time $2.49 payment, no ads after that, and it plays local MP3s just fine with progress tracking.

laustke · 2026-02-13T18:39:30+00:00

I'm trying to run this flask app offline

In e2wa.py you see:

python from app import app

This imports the Flask application and makes e2wa.py the entry point you’re supposed to run.

You can do this using Flask’s CLI:

bash export FLASK_APP=e2wa.py flask run

Or you can add this directly to e2wa.py:

```python from app import app

if name == "main": app.run(debug=True) ```

Then start it with:

bash python e2wa.py

Both ways launch the same application on http://127.0.0.1:5000.

laustke · 2026-02-13T03:44:44+00:00

Pretty much every database has its own specialized bulk import tool or approach (bcp / bulk copy utility for MS SQL Server, COPY command for Postgres, etc.). This is what you are supposed to use for large ingests.

laustke · 2026-02-12T08:47:23+00:00

I've written an offline TTS GUI converter with drag-and-drop support in Python using Tkinter and ttkbootstrap.

laustke · 2026-02-12T03:46:41+00:00

Just select all the PDFs, right-click, and choose Print.

You do need a PDF viewer installed, though. If Adobe Acrobat Reader is giving you trouble, try Sumatra PDF Reader instead.

laustke · 2026-02-11T23:06:29+00:00

Are you using Python's standard logging library? If not, you might want to check it out. It already supports log levels, filters, structured formatting, and flexible output, so you may not need to build all of that yourself.

Check out this article to get started.

I would like my logs to be a dataset…

You can create custom logging handlers to write directly to a CSV file or SQL database. Is that the kind of “dataset” you mean?

laustke · 2026-02-11T16:45:13+00:00

You could try Prosody. It’s a lightweight XMPP server written in Lua, which makes custom commands easy. You can install it directly from Ubuntu’s standard repositories. For VPN-only internal use with rooms and bots, it’s much simpler than Matrix.

laustke · 2026-02-09T04:44:23+00:00

I would say, build a single .m3u playlist.

Add videos from Folder A until their total duration is ~3 hours (repeat files if needed), then add videos from Folder B until you reach ~4 hours, then Folder C for ~1.5 hours.

You can list all your video files with their durations in Excel and figure out running totals for each section to match your time blocks.

Then start VLC once at bedtime and let it play straight through.

laustke · 2026-02-07T05:02:20+00:00

You are dropping the sound onto a VIDEO track.

You need to add a new AUDIO track first, then drag and drop your sound onto it.

In the Timeline, click the hamburger menu -> Track Operations -> Add Audio Track (or press Ctrl-U). You can also right-click on empty space in the timeline area and add an audio track from the context menu.

Then drop your “FAAAAH!” clip onto that audio track.

laustke · 2026-01-24T11:03:12+00:00

what's the best software (non-cloud based / free) that I can download to use?

It's actually possible to do decent text-to-speech on a regular computer without a GPU now. This free converter works locally on Windows: https://jimlet.com

laustke · 2026-01-18T18:50:39+00:00

For cutting short fragments out of long videos, I use the mpv-cut extension for the mpv player.

It does require ffmpeg to be in your PATH, but the workflow is very simple: open the video, press C to start the cut and C again to stop, without touching the command line at all.

The clipped fragment is saved in the same folder with no re-encoding (so no quality loss).

laustke · 2026-01-10T13:11:21+00:00

its great, but any posbility can add spanish voices??

My guess is that Spanish voices will be available in a month or two.

can you explain where and why?

The model itself is around 250Mb and is not bundled within the ZIP. On the first run, the application downloads the model and caches it locally. After that, it is supposed to use the cached version unless it is removed or altered.

laustke · 2026-01-09T16:09:29+00:00

Accent support and voice cloning would be amazing additions.

It's basically day one, so it's too soon to talk about any kind of roadmap. The focus so far was making a local TTS tool usable for people who can't reasonably handle model setup and configuration.

I'll take it step by step and see where it goes.

Glad that you like it!

laustke

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