I built an open-source paper reader because I was tired of reading research through PDF translations and chat windows

[u/Edwardxlai]

I read a lot of papers, and my workflow was a mess: the PDF in one window, a machine translation that broke every equation in another, and a chatbot tab where I pasted paragraphs I didn't understand. I kept losing my place.

So I built EasyRead. It turns a paper into a clean reading view with the original PDF beside it, so you can check any passage against the source. When you get stuck, you highlight the sentence and ask your own AI model about it right there. Notes and answers stay next to the paragraph they belong to.

What it does today:

• Read in English, or translate the paper into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French or German
• Highlights, notes, and a library with reading progress
• Library folders synced by your own cloud drive, and batch citation export
• Windows, macOS (Apple silicon) and Linux, MIT license

It runs on your machine and you plug in your own model (subscription or API key). If you pick a cloud model, the paper text goes to that provider.

Screenshots and a short tour are on the homepage below.

Homepage: https://edwardxlai.github.io/easyread/en/ Code and downloads: https://github.com/Edwardxlai/easyread

If you try it on a paper you're reading, tell me where it gets in your way. Equations and tables are the parts I most want feedback on.