How to use a PDF as a teleprompter script on iPhone or iPad

A PDF is a fixed page. It does not re-flow, so on a phone you either pinch and pan around a tiny page or read lines cut off at the edge. It cannot scroll at a steady speed, it has no big-type mode and you cannot mark where to pause.

A teleprompter app turns the words into one column of large text that scrolls. That is the whole point of getting the text out of the PDF.

Open the PDF in Files or Preview and try to select a word with a long press. If you can select and copy words, the PDF has text and an app can read it. If the whole page highlights as one picture, it is a scan or a photo of a page, and no text can be read from it.

For a scan, retype the script or use a scanner or OCR tool first. Apple’s Notes can scan documents and recognise text in them, but the menu names depend on your iOS version, so check what your phone offers.

There are two common routes. Either open the teleprompter app and use its import button to pick the file from Files, or open the PDF first and use Share to send it to the app. A PDF opened from Mail or Safari can usually be saved to Files first so that you can find it again.

If the PDF is a page of a longer document, copying the text and pasting it into the app is often quicker than importing the whole file.

Reading text out of a PDF is imperfect. Whatever app you use, read through the result once and look for:

• Lines cut in the middle of a sentence, because the PDF stored each printed line separately. Join them back into sentences.
• Two-column pages read in the wrong order, with a line from the left column followed by one from the right. Put the columns in order.
• Page numbers, headers, footers and footnote marks that end up in the middle of the script. Delete them.
• Bullets and tables that become strings of fragments. Rewrite them as sentences you would actually say.

Then split long sentences, one idea per line, so you can see where to breathe. The guide on writing a script for a teleprompter has more on that.

Make the text big enough to read at your distance and set a pace you can keep. Read the first minute out loud before you record, because a script written for the eye often sounds stiff when spoken. The font-size guide shows how to size the text.

Talkzy for iPhone and iPad can import .pdf, .docx, .txt, .md and .rtf files, or you can paste text. Importing is free. The app reads the PDF’s text with Apple’s PDFKit and puts it in a new script named after the file, and the code itself notes that the column order can come out wrong on complex layouts, so check the text in the editor before you read it aloud.

You can also share a PDF to Talkzy from Files, Google Docs or Safari, where Talkzy is offered as an option. Talkzy cannot read a scanned PDF that contains no text. A line starting with # becomes a section, which is useful for splitting a long script.

Prompter-only mode, mirroring and manual scrolling are free. Voice-follow is free for 3 takes a day and Pro removes the limit. Talkzy for iPhone and iPad is on the App Store.

On a Mac, Talkzy imports .txt, .md, .rtf and .docx but not PDF, so there copy the text out of the PDF and paste it into a new script, or save it as a Word file first.