Translate a slide PDF without losing its layout
Most translators give you the text and lose the slides: the layout is gone, and labels inside figures, such as “Higher temperature” or “Surface”, stay in English. Here the PDF stays as it is and only the words change.
What to ask
With BCD connected to ChatGPT or Claude, the AI can open files on your computer and run programs there. So one request is enough, from your phone as well:
Turn heat-transfer.pdf in my Downloads folder into a Korean PDF with the same layout. Translate the English labels inside the figures too.
What Claude did on the Mac
Read where the text is
PyMuPDF extracts each slide’s text with its position, size and color. Lines that wrap are joined back into paragraphs.Translate
Paragraph by paragraph. The first time a term appears, the English stays beside it, as in “전도 (Conduction)”.Put it back in place
The original words are removed and the translation is written in the same spot and color. Longer text is set smaller to fit its box.Text inside figures
macOS’s built-in OCR (Vision) finds the words in each image; the spot is covered in the background color and the translation written over it.Check by eye
Each page is rendered to an image to look for overlaps or overflow, which are then fixed.
This 7-slide deck took a few minutes. Four PDFs of 30 to 45 slides went through the same steps.
What stays in English
Equations such as Q/t = kA(T₂−T₁)/d, signs and logos in photos, and labels written at an angle.
Sources and references, so they can still be looked up.
Very small figure labels stay small in Korean too.
Before you try it
The figure step uses macOS’s OCR, so it needs a Mac. Turn on file writing and running commands for that Mac in your BCD dashboard: new computers start read-only. The AI installs PyMuPDF with Python if it is missing.
BCD runs on Mac and Linux, and on Windows in beta.
One computer free, with 20,000 tool calls a month. No card required. Your AI app’s subscription is separate.
Source: “Lecture 5 - Heat Transfer”, Robert Wagner, Introduction to Physical Science (LibreTexts), CC BY 4.0. Figures: OpenStax College Physics, CC BY 4.0. The translated version is shared under the same CC BY 4.0.