Reading PDFs without losing your place

A PDF is often the worst format to read something dense in, and it's rarely the content's fault. It's the format: a journal header and page number repeating on every single page, a paragraph split awkwardly across a page break, and Chrome's built-in viewer, which extensions can't reach into, so nothing can guide your eyes across it.

The header-and-footer problem

Open the same PDF in Skimora's reader and the running header and page number are stripped out, and headings are detected, so what was a page-by-page interruption reads as continuous text again. This alone removes a surprising amount of the friction in reading a long paper or report.

Then add a pacer

Once the text reads cleanly, the same three pacers available on a web page work in the PDF reader too. Cadence and GlideMark are a good fit for a method section or a dense legal paragraph you want to move through at a steady, deliberate pace without the page replacing itself. Autopace is a better fit if you want the page to disappear entirely and just show you one word at a time.

What it can't do

If the PDF is a scan — a photograph of a page, with no text underneath — there's no text to bold or pace through, because there's no text at all. Skimora reads text; it doesn't run OCR on images of pages.

A simple way to start

Open the file in Skimora, turn on bionic reading first, and see whether the bolding alone makes a difference. If you still find your eyes drifting or losing the line, try Cadence next: the mark of where you are is usually the missing piece in a document that's otherwise just dense.