PDF Reading Report
Drop in a paper, report, or chapter. See how much of it is real reading, which sections are dense, and how long each will take you.
Choose a PDF
The file is read in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Or drop a file anywhere on this page. Works best with text PDFs such as papers and reports. Scanned pages have no text to read.
About 24 min of real reading.
Questions about reading PDFs
How long does it take to read a PDF?
Less than the page count suggests. A typical paper loses a fifth or more of its words to references, running headers, page numbers, and captions. What is left reads at about 240 words a minute for easy prose and closer to half that for dense methods sections. This report separates the two and gives a time for each section.
How is difficulty measured?
From the text itself: average sentence length, the share of long words, and how thick the section is with numbers, brackets, and symbols. It is a rough guide to where you will slow down. It does not know your field, so a specialist will find some sections easier than rated.
Why are PDFs tiring to read?
They are laid out for paper. Two columns, small type, and footnotes force constant scrolling and zooming on a screen, and headers and page numbers interrupt every page. Reading the cleaned text in one column, or one word at a time, removes most of that.