Focus Mode on a PDF, Done Properly

People look for an RSVP reader for PDFs, and then find the awkward part: a one-word display and a PDF are a genuinely difficult combination. What you want is to get through the paper or report and keep what you read, and that is decided at the import step, not the reading step.

A PDF is not text. It's a page-description format: instructions for placing glyphs at coordinates. Extract the raw text naively and you get the author's words interleaved with everything else on the page — running headers, page numbers, journal names, footnote fragments, and two-column layouts read straight across the columns into word salad. On a normal screen your eyes route around that clutter without noticing. In a one-word display there is no routing around anything: every extracted token arrives at the focal point, one at a time, with equal authority.

What the import pipeline actually does

Velo treats PDF import as a structuring problem and solves it on-device before a single word is streamed:

• Chapter detection — chapters, parts, and sections recovered from the document's structure, with a hierarchical table of contents and per-chapter progress.
• Running headers and page numbers stripped — the difference between reading a paper and reading the words "Journal of Cognitive Science" forty times.
• Two-column layouts resequenced — academic papers read in actual reading order.
• Footnotes and endnotes extracted and linked — matched to their reference points instead of erupting mid-sentence in the stream.
• OCR artifacts cleaned — and scanned documents go through on-device Vision OCR, with an optional server-side pass for genuinely difficult scans, metered in credits and invoked deliberately.

The result is a document that reads like the book it was meant to be: real typography, figures in place, footnotes you can follow. That is also exactly what a one-word display needs — clean, ordered prose. What you read is the author's words, nothing else.

Reading the PDF in Focus Mode

Once imported, a PDF behaves like a real book. Focus Mode (RSVP) shows one word at a time on a fixed focal point, so attention has nowhere to slide. As specs: 50 to 1,000 words per minute, each word aligned to its optimal recognition point, timing that adapts to punctuation and word complexity. When you hit a dense passage — or a figure, a table, an equation, anything that's meaningless as a word stream — one tap drops you into Reader mode: full typeset pages, your position highlighted, eyes free to roam. Jump back and the stream resumes exactly where you left it — every mode shares one word-level position and the switch lands in under 100 ms. Scrub lets you drag backwards through the words you half-caught.

That mode-switching matters more for PDFs than for any other format, because technical and academic documents are exactly where a bare word stream breaks down. The stream carries you through the prose; the page view is there for everything the prose refers to. For the full picture of reading papers this way, see reading academic PDFs on an iPad.

The practical details

Import from Files, Safari, or Mail via the iOS Share Sheet. Imported PDFs live on-device and read fully offline. Every reading mode is free, along with import for up to 3 books, reading stats, and the intelligence dashboard; Pro removes the library cap and adds cloud sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

If your PDF reading is mostly 40-page reports and papers rather than novels, this is the use case Velo's pipeline was built around — and the one where the difference between "streams the file" and "structures the file" is most visible.

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