LECTOR
LECTOR (Latin, "reader" — the one who reads aloud) — a PDF reader for the iPad that shows books the way they were printed, as spreads side by side, and reads them aloud, the sentence being spoken lit up on the page. Books are copied into the app so they open instantly, and the whole thing works with no connection at all.
What it does
- The library — open one PDF, add several, add a whole folder, paste a link (Dropbox share links work), or drop files on it. Covers, cleaned-up titles, search, sort by recent / title / added, and a progress bar under each cover. Instructions for bringing PDFs over from Apple Books.
- Spreads — two pages facing, or one at a time; the first page can stand alone as a cover or join the first spread; left-to-right or right-to-left. Remembered per book, along with the page you were on.
- Turning pages — tap the edges, swipe, use the arrow keys or the slider, or jump from a grid of page thumbnails. Pinch to zoom, up to 5×.
- Read aloud — ▶ Read starts at the top of the spread; double-tap any sentence to start there. The sentence being read is highlighted, pages turn by themselves to follow, and pause keeps your place.
- Voices — any voice the iPad has, filtered to your language, with Premium and Enhanced voices marked; speed from 0.5× to 2×.
- Night reading — the page inverted, for the dark.
Reading aloud needs a PDF with real text in it: a scan with no text layer can be shown but not read.
Offline
Nothing loads from a CDN. A service worker keeps the app on the device, and the books live in the browser's own storage — which on the iPad means the Home Screen app and Safari each keep a separate library. voice-test.html, beside it, is an experiment: the Kokoro neural voice model run entirely on the iPad, timed against Apple's voices, to find out whether it sounds better and keeps up well enough to take over.
Lives in TROY/LECTOR, deployed at https://auriea.art/lector/ (since 2026-09-30).