Read a PDF aloud on Mac without page numbers and headers

Short answerPreview reads the text exactly as it's laid out, and Apple Community answers confirm it has no setting to suppress page numbers. The free workaround is to select only the body text on each page, or paste the text into TextEdit and delete the repeated headers with Find & Replace, then use Edit → Speech → Start Speaking. Aloud reads PDFs and leaves out running headers, footers and page numbers, and rejoins hyphenated line breaks, automatically.

The free built-in fix

1. Select only body text. In Preview, drag-select the body text of a page, skipping header and footer, then press Option-Esc.
2. Or clean it in TextEdit. Copy the text into TextEdit, use Edit → Find → Find and Replace to remove the repeated header, then Edit → Speech → Start Speaking.
3. Fix hyphenated breaks. Replace a hyphen followed by a line break so split words read as one.

The better fix: Aloud

If the built-in tools keep getting in your way, Aloud (ours, $19 once per Mac, macOS 14 or later) is made for this:

• Skips running headers, footers and page numbers, and rejoins hyphenated line breaks.
• Scanned pages are recognized on your Mac.
• Go to Page, resume from the last sentence, and .m4a export.
• Natural voices: your Mac's Enhanced and Premium voices, the on-device Kokoro neural voice (Apple silicon, macOS 15+), or ElevenLabs/Cartesia with your own API key.

Buy Aloud, $19 once   Launch offer: code LAUNCH25 takes 25% off until Oct 31. 3-day free trial, no card or account.