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).

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.