Two-column PDF to one column
Choose a PDF with two columns, such as a journal article or a conference paper. This page reads the left column, then the right one, joins broken lines back into paragraphs and shows the text as one column you can read on a phone. You can save the result as an EPUB or a text file.
Choose a PDF or drop it here
Works best with text PDFs: papers, reports, e-books. Up to 100 MB.
The PDF is read inside this browser tab and is not uploaded anywhere.
How it works
- The browser opens the PDF and reads where each word sits on the page.
- On each page it looks for the empty band between the columns. When it finds one, it reads the left column from top to bottom, then the right column. Titles and abstracts that run across the whole page stay in place.
- Lines are joined into paragraphs, words split across lines are put back together, and page numbers and running headers that repeat on every page are dropped.
What works well, and what does not
Works well: journal articles, conference papers, newsletters, two-page book scans that already have a text layer, and ordinary one-column PDFs.
Struggles with: tables (cells are read column by column), math formulas, footnotes that sit inside a column, and pages with three or more columns. Scanned PDFs without a text layer do not work here at all.
Reading PDFs on an Android phone
If you read PDFs on your phone often, Scroll+ turns text PDFs into flowing text inside the app and keeps your books on the device for offline reading. The app is free with ads.
Get Scroll+ on Google Play