high sierramacospdfpreviewtext to speech
Recently I enabled Speak selected text when key is pressed feature in Accessibility menu.
It works well in Safari, Finder and other apps. But in Preview and other PDF readers like Skim, it acts wired. Although I selected a single word, it starts speaking from the first page of document, and if the first page contains only cover image, it says nothing. (silence)
It's macOS High Sierra with latest updates installed.
This works for me on Mountain Lion:
Open all the JPG's in Preview so that the files are selectable within the one window, i.e. thumbnails of the JPG's are viewable in the selection pane located the window's left side.
Click in the selection pane and select all the thumbnails with Cmd-A.
Select File > Print... from the menu bar.
Select PDF > (from the drop down) Save as PDF... from within the Print Dialog.
Take it from there...
Merged PDFs from Preview are perfectly valid and follow the standard. I've never found any incompatibilities with them. It does merge it into a single PDF, and any pages that are deleted are removed from the file. You can test this by checking file sizes first before merging, then after merging, then after deleting some pages.
The only drawback I've found with Preview is that the Apple code for writing PDFs seems to default to writing PDFs which are faster for Preview to render, but which are larger than typically put out by Acrobat. (At the moment, I can't find the link that originally proposed this hypothesis... It's been a number of years.) For example, you might open an Adobe-created PDF in Preview, immediately save it to another file, and notice that it has expanded. This change in file size does not change the image quality in any way.
In general, the change in file size is not too much of a deal. It's only in rare cases (such as 120MB scanned PDFs) that I worry about which app I use to create the PDF.
Best Answer
while the Preview is active select your text then on the top menue select "Edit" then select "Speech" then "Start speaking". You can create a keyboard shortcut for it by adding a shortcut key combination to the Keyboard in System Preferences: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25377?locale=en_US