How to turn a PDF, document or link into a video (2026)
Upload a PDF or Word file, or paste a link, and Doodaro reads the text, finds the slides in it and turns them into a drawn video. Every step, with the limits.
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You rarely start from nothing. The talk exists as slides, the guide exists as a PDF, the explanation exists as a page on your site. This guide shows the three ways to get that text into Doodaro, what the limits are, and how to turn it into a video people watch to the end.
The three ways in
Open a project, go to Story, and open the text panel. There are three tabs.
| Tab | Best for | What it accepts |
|---|---|---|
| Paste text | A script you already wrote, or a few paragraphs | Up to 60,000 characters |
| Upload a file | Reports, lesson plans, whitepapers, manuscripts | PDF, DOCX, RTF, TXT, Markdown, HTML, up to 8 MB and 100 pages |
| Paste a link | Your articles, help pages, online PDFs | A public URL, or a direct link to a PDF, Word, text or Markdown file |
All three end in the same place: a review box with your text, which you edit before anything becomes a scene.
What happens to an uploaded document
Doodaro pulls out the text and nothing else. Images, styling, headers and footers are left behind, and so are the parts of a web page that are not the article: menus, cookie banners, sidebars and scripts.
Two limits are worth knowing before you start:
- A scanned PDF will not work. If you cannot select the text in a PDF reader, Doodaro cannot read it either. Export a new PDF with real text, or run the scan through OCR first.
- A password-protected PDF will not work. Remove the password and save an unlocked copy.
The slide outline
After the import, Doodaro shows a panel like this:
7 slides found. About 2.4 minutes spoken. Every line comes from the source; nothing was written for you.
It reads the document’s structure — headings, numbered sections and lists — and turns each section into a slide with its heading and the two or three lines that carry the point. Numbers and percentages are kept, because those are the lines people remember.
You get two buttons:
- Use the outline replaces the review text with the slide version: one heading and its points per slide. This is the right choice for how-to pages, reports and lesson material, where structure is the value.
- Use the full text puts the whole document back. Choose this for a story, a sermon, an interview or anything where the exact wording is the point.
Either way, the text is editable. Nothing is locked.
Cutting a document down to a video
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the video is good.
Narration runs at about 150 words a minute. So:
- A 2-minute video is about 300 words.
- A 3-minute video is about 450 words.
- A 10-page report is about 4,000 words, which is 27 minutes of narration. Nobody is watching that.
Cut to the five or seven points that matter and give each one a scene. If a document really has three separate topics, make three videos rather than one long one.
From slides to scenes
Press Build scenes and each slide becomes a scene with a picture description and narration. From there the normal storyboard rules apply: one idea per scene, 8 to 12 seconds each, and a picture description under 30 words draws more reliably than a long one.
If one scene misses, open it, change the narration or the picture description and press Redraw or Revoice. Only that scene is regenerated.
A worked example
A 12-page onboarding guide, 3,800 words, imported as a PDF:
- The import found 11 slides from the guide’s headings.
- “Use the outline” produced a 520-word script.
- Three slides about billing were deleted; they deserved their own video.
- The first slide was rewritten by hand, because “Introduction” is not a hook. It became “Your first week, in four steps.”
- Build scenes produced eight scenes. Style: Illustrated Notes. Length: 3 minutes 10 seconds.
Total editing time was about fifteen minutes, most of it spent deciding what to leave out.
Before you import someone else’s page
Use pages and documents you own, or ones you have permission to use. Two reasons:
- Copyright. A video version of an article is still that article’s content.
- Platform rules. YouTube does not reward reused, mass-produced content, and a channel of videos made from other people’s pages is exactly what that policy describes.
Your own docs, your own site, your own reports and material you are licensed to use are all fair game, and that is usually where the useful material is anyway.
Common errors and what they mean
| What you see | What to do |
|---|---|
| “That page needs a sign-in” | Save the page as a PDF and upload the file |
| “That link points to a private or local address” | The address is not reachable from the internet; use the public one |
| “No readable text was found” | The text is inside images; use an OCR copy or paste the text |
| “This PDF is password protected” | Save an unlocked copy |
| “Larger than 8 MB” | Split the document, or export a text-only copy |
| “Longer than 60,000 characters” | Split it into sections and make one video per section |
Frequently asked questions
How do I turn a PDF into a video?
Open a project in Doodaro, go to Story, choose 'Upload a file' and drop the PDF, or use 'Paste a link' if the PDF is online. Doodaro reads the text, shows it for review with a slide outline taken from the headings, and then Build scenes turns each slide into a drawn scene with narration. Export the MP4 in 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1.
Can I turn a URL into a video?
Yes. Choose 'Paste a link' in the Story screen and paste the address of a public page or an online PDF, Word, text or Markdown file. Doodaro fetches it, keeps the visible text and leaves out menus, ads and scripts.
Which files can Doodaro read?
PDF, Word (.docx), RTF, TXT, Markdown and HTML, up to 8 MB and 100 pages. Older .doc files and scanned PDFs without selectable text do not work; save a new copy or paste the text.
What is the slide outline?
After an import, Doodaro shows the slides it found in the document: one per heading or section, each with the two or three sentences or list items that carry the point. It is plain parsing, not AI writing, so every line comes from your document. Choose 'Use the outline' for a tight script, or 'Use the full text' to keep everything.
Does Doodaro write the script for me?
The import gives you text, not a finished script. You can edit it, or ask the story assistant to draft a shorter version from it on paid plans. Either way you review the words before they become scenes.
Why does my page fail to import?
The most common reasons are a sign-in or paywall, a bot check, a private or internal address, a file over 8 MB, or a page whose text is inside images. Save the page as a PDF and upload the file instead.
Can I use any article I find online?
Use pages you own or have the right to use. Turning someone else's article into a video raises copyright problems, and YouTube's policy on reused, mass-produced content applies to the result.