Sure, but why?

…and my bow

Yes, however scientific papers aren’t always linearly formatted PDFs (eg 2-columns), so pdftotext tends to be brittle.

If you only mean reading a file from a specific selection of text, I’ve never seen something that,

Okular actually does that, and with Pied I can use nice Piper voices, but the controls are very basic (start at the stop of the page, pause, stop).

ReadAloud sort of does but it requires sending the pdf to their website, which is obviously not ideal.

A screen reader reads what’s on the screen. What I’m describing is reading a document. ReadAloud does exactly that for Firefox, I am just asking for standalone applications.

LMDE because it’s Mint and a recent Debian stable.