ReglyphReglyph vs Reflo, Side by Side: Which One Keeps Your Scanned PDF's Layout?
Reglyph is our product, so we can't claim to be neutral. What we can do is make the test fair: same files, same day, same target languages, and every result shown exactly as it came out, including the page we lost. Tested 2 October 2026.
- Scanned PDF: Reglyph. It puts the translation back on the photo, colored panel or old paper behind the text, where Reflo covers it with a flat box. It also translates nearly everything Reflo leaves out: tables, chart labels, captions, headers.
- Digital PDF: Reflo. It fit a dense two-column paper into French with no overlaps; ours had lines landing on top of each other.
Scorecard
| Page | Languages | Better result | What decided it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text over a photo (scan) | EN → ZH | Reglyph | Background: Reflo boxed over the photo |
| 1871 book page (scan) | FR → EN | Reglyph | Background: paper texture kept |
| Financial table (scan) | EN → JA | Reglyph | Coverage: Reflo left the table in English |
| Colored panels (scan) | EN → ES | Reglyph, slightly | Close: Reflo boxed the title bars and missed the footer; our tab label overflowed |
| Dense two-column paper (digital) | EN → FR | Reflo | Typesetting: ours overlapped in three places |
| Paper with a parameter table (digital) | EN → KO | Tie | Layout even; Reflo translated code keys |
| Score | Reglyph 5 · Reflo 2 | A tie scores a point for each |
On three of the four scans, Reflo put its translation on flat boxes. On five of the six pages, it left something untranslated.
How we tested
- We picked six pages that tend to trip up PDF translators. Four are scans: a guide page full of colored panels, an annual report with text over a photo, a financial table, and a page from an 1871 book. Scans are what we built Reglyph for.
- The other two are digital research papers, which is Reflo's home ground. We included them on purpose.
- Six pages is a small sample. Read this as a close look at a few hard pages, not a statistical benchmark.
- The scans are image-only PDFs with no text layer, the same as what a scanner gives you. The papers are ordinary PDFs where you can select the text.
- We only looked at layout and completeness, meaning text left untranslated, backgrounds covered up, and words cut off or overlapping. We didn't score the wording of the translations.
Scanned PDFs: Reglyph is clearly better
Reglyph won all four scans, and scans are what we built it for. The first thing you notice is the background. Once the source text is erased, does the photo or paper come back, or does a flat box take its place? That's the biggest gap between the two. Coverage is the other one: Reflo left whole sections untranslated on several pages.
Text over a photo (English → Chinese)
The original is an aerial photo of a coastline with the English printed straight onto it. Reflo set every block of Chinese on a solid gray-blue box, and together the boxes cover most of the sea on the left half of the page. On ours, the Chinese sits on the photo itself, with the image filled back in where the English used to be. We did get the three big numbers wrong (bold white in the original, thin and pale in ours), but this is the page where Reglyph's lead is widest.
An 1871 book scan (French → English)
This page comes from a real book printed in 1871, and you can see the age in the paper. Reflo's English sits in a flat beige rectangle with all the grain wiped out, like a sticky note slapped onto an old book. Neither tool kept the first-line indents, but the backgrounds aren't close: ours looks as if it had been printed on that same yellowed sheet.
A financial table and chart (English → Japanese)
On the financial report, Reglyph wins on coverage. Reflo translated the heading and the two paragraphs and stopped there, leaving the table, the chart labels, the header and the footer in English. On a financial statement, the table is usually the part you opened the file for. We translated close to everything and kept every number in its cell.
Colored panels on white (English → Spanish)
Of the four scans, this is the closest. Reflo's titles sit on pale boxes that chop into the green gradient, the "Gut Health" tab comes out truncated as "Salud Intesti", and the footer stayed in English. We have one problem, with that same tab: the Spanish runs long, wraps onto two lines and pokes out of the box. Both sides have rough spots here, but Reflo's touch more of the page.
Digital PDFs: Reflo's typesetting is stronger
Digital PDFs already have clean text, usually on a white page, so putting backgrounds back barely comes into it. The hard part is getting longer text into the same space, and Reflo handled that better than we did.
A dense two-column paper (English → French)
We lost this one. The page was packed to begin with, and French runs longer than English. Reflo shrank the type and fit the whole page in. Ours has three spots where lines land on top of each other and turn into an unreadable smear, most visibly near the top of the left column and around the "III. DÉTECTEURS" heading.
A paper with a parameter table (English → Korean)
We scored this page a tie, since on layout there's nothing to choose between them. The difference is in the parameter table on the right. Reflo translated the configuration keys too, so n_layers became n_레이어, and if you search the model's code for that, you won't find it. We left the keys exactly as written.
Which one should you use?
- Reglyph for scans, phone photos, pages with photos or colored backgrounds, and tables where every cell needs translating.
- For digital PDFs, especially dense ones going into a longer language, Reflo did better in our test.
- The surest test is your own file. Reglyph gives you 5 free pages a day: try it here.
For more tools side by side, see the best PDF translation services. Not sure whether your file is a scan? Here's how to tell.
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Translate 5 pages free, every dayFrequently asked
Which PDF translator keeps the layout of a scanned PDF?
In our side-by-side test of four scanned pages, Reglyph kept the original background behind the translated text on all four: photos, colored title bars and old paper stayed visible. Reflo set its translation on flat boxes on three of them, and left some text untranslated (tables, chart labels, captions, headers or footers) on five of the six test pages.
Can Reflo translate a scanned PDF?
Yes. It read all four image-only pages in our test and translated the body text. On several of them it skipped table cells, chart labels, captions, headers and footers. And on photos, colored bars and old paper, it put the translation on a flat box.
Which is better for scanned documents, Reglyph or Reflo?
Reglyph, on all four scans we tried. It put the translation back onto photos, colored panels and paper texture instead of covering them up. It also translated the tables and captions Reflo skipped.
Which is better for digital PDFs?
Reflo typeset them better in our test. On a dense two-column paper going into French, it fit everything in, while Reglyph's version had overlapping lines. The second paper was a tie on layout; Reflo did translate code parameter names there, which Reglyph left alone.
You make Reglyph. Is this comparison fair?
We can't be neutral, so we tried to make it checkable instead. Both tools got the same files on the same day with default settings, every result is shown unedited next to the original, the page Reflo won is included. All six source pages are public, so you can run the same test yourself.