Bionic Reading Converter

1. Paste or type your text into the input box. Or choose a file to import: PDF, DOCX, DOC, TXT or MD, up to 5MB.

2. Set Fixation, which controls the percentage of each word that is highlighted. It starts at 50%.

3. Pick a Contrast level: None, Low, Medium or High, depending on how strongly you want the highlighted part to stand out.

4. Check the live preview in the Bionic Reading Mode panel and adjust until the text feels comfortable to read.

5. Copy the result, or export it, as HTML, Markdown or plain text. Use Reset to start again.

Bionic reading is a formatting method developed by Swiss typographer Renato Casutt. It bolds the first few letters of each word. The idea is that these bold anchors guide your eyes along the line while your brain recognizes the rest of each word from its shape.

Some readers find it helps them stay focused and move through text more smoothly. Others find it distracting. Research on its effects is still mixed, so it's best treated as something to try rather than a guaranteed shortcut.

Here is the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" converted to bionic reading format. Exact results depend on your Fixation and Contrast settings.

The quick brown fox jumps over The lazy dog

The same text as Markdown output:

**Th**e **qui**ck **bro**wn **fo**x **jum**ps **ov**er **Th**e **la**zy **do**g

And the start of it as HTML output:

<strong>Th</strong>e <strong>qui</strong>ck <strong>bro</strong>wn ...

To convert a PDF, use the file import option and choose your file (up to 5MB). The same option accepts DOCX, DOC, TXT and MD files. The text is converted and shown in the preview, ready to copy or export as HTML, Markdown or plain text.

Because the result is converted text, the original page layout is not kept. Images, tables and multi-column pages in particular don't convert cleanly. For a long document or a book, work chapter by chapter so you can check each section before moving on.

You may see this kind of tool called a bionic font converter, a bionic reader converter or a bionic text converter. They all describe the same idea. This converter doesn't install or change a font. It adds bold formatting to the start of each word, so your text keeps whatever font your document or app already uses.

There is no single best setting. Lighter highlighting tends to suit slow, careful reading of novels or complex material, because it keeps the text feeling natural. Stronger highlighting can be easier for skimming news and email. Try a sample paragraph at a few settings, then convert the whole document once it feels right.

Converted text can go into Word, Google Docs, email, Notion, Obsidian, blogs and e-readers. Markdown output is the smoothest fit for apps like Notion, Obsidian and Typora. HTML output can bring unwanted inline styles into some editors, so use "Paste as Text" or "Paste without Formatting" where you want clean results.

It works best with Latin-alphabet languages such as English, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese. Results are more variable with Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. Chinese and other logographic languages don't benefit in the same way, because each character represents a whole word rather than being built from letters.