Laptop showing a document being prepared for audio conversion, with annotated pages and headphones
PRACTICAL GUIDE · BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS

Prepare PDFs and DOCX Files for Better Audio Conversion

A clean source document prevents repeated headers, missing passages and confusing narration.

1. PDF versus DOCX

DOCX files usually preserve editable paragraphs and heading styles. PDFs prioritize layout, so columns, tables and page breaks may disrupt text extraction order.

2. Check whether your PDF contains text

Try selecting and copying a sentence. If pages are images, optical character recognition (OCR) may be needed. Proofread recognized text carefully before speech generation.

3. Remove extraction artifacts

Delete stray page numbers, repeated headers and footers, and accidental hyphenation. Rejoin split paragraphs and check quotation marks, apostrophes and accented characters.

4. Handle tables, images and charts

Audio cannot automatically communicate the meaning of a complex chart. Add an authorized, relevant written description. Dense tables may need conversion into sentences or lists.

5. Separate headings and body text

Keep chapter headings clear. In BOOKNARIA, review imported sections so that an automatically narrated title is not duplicated at the start of the chapter text.

6. Listen to a sample

Try a passage containing numbers, a footnote, a proper name and a quotation. Check continuity, omissions and repeated words. Fix the editable text before processing the rest.

7. Protect sensitive data

Do not send personal or confidential files to a third-party service without an appropriate legal basis and safeguards. Your BOOKNARIA project is private by default, but voice generation uses an external provider.

Also useful: Set up Gemini for BOOKNARIA.