Getting the Mac to read PDF files aloud

I tried previous suggestion to have my MacBook to read PDFs with speech. I tried Edit -> start speaking in Preview. I also tried the regular way of of using a shortcut key preset in System Preferences for a highlighted section. Nothing happens.

I checked to make sure it reads using other documents and/or screen text.

My eyes need a break and I would like to get speech to read aloud the PDFs. What other suggestions do you have?

Solution 1:

Preview voice reading will happen after selecting the text you require to be read first / as mentioned above it needs to be selectable and recognisable text - then proceed with previous steps: Edit -> Speech -> Start Reading

Hope this helps

Solution 2:

A command line solution:

1. Install homebrew. See https://docs.brew.sh/Installation for details.

2. Launch Terminal and run:

   brew install xpdf
   pdftotext file.pdf - | iconv -t UTF-8//IGNORE | say