Hah; I helped a bit with this! Funny to see it pop up on Tildes. The maintainer was having a spot of trouble with some tricky cross-compilation flags and snafus, so I lent them a hand while the other contributor was taking a break. It was incidental to some other work I'm messing around with: putting together a browser-local file converter per this thread a while back.
I guess, if anyone has any common file conversions/operations that they figure would be useful, please feel free to prod me! Right now I'm targeting ffmpeg, imagemagick, libreoffice, pandoc (ofc), and 7z, but I might take a swing at ebook-converter/calibre if there's interest (and I can stomach the toolchain).
I would understand if you want to stay away for legal reasons, but browser based drm removal would be awesome. I just had to download and install calibre with drmtools just to remove the adobe drm from books I legally purchased (interesting how I don’t have to jump through crazy hoops for the books I don’t purchase). I don’t use calibre for anything else, and it would be nice to have these as standalone tools.
Yeah, unfortunately I can't facilitate that -- as you note, it's extremely illegal in Canada, with some very specific exemptions. Apologies; I have no desire to attract undue judiciary wrath on a side project 😅
Yeah, I totally understand. It’s just so frustrating that paying customers get a much worse experience. Anyways props on getting these tools to work on the web!
I hope someone else cracks that nut, though; I'm certainly no fan of DRM!
(and fwiw I only played a reaaaallly small part; I'd imagine this would've happened without me, too. But it was nice to contribute to something people liked, for once!)
For a handful of somewhat obscure formats, up to and including libreoffice's own! Other file conversion services have shown up in my research for this project, and that one has a nice list of file formats that adding libreoffice would support.
(that said, I've yet to find one that attempts to get everything working in the browser, in wasm! Hopefully I'll be able to shove everything into one, giant wasm lib in the end, so that the world can get a big 'ol GPL'd dynamic library that can convert anything to anything)
Pandoc claims to be a universal document converter--and it is pretty great for XML, LaTeX, and a few obscure formats--but I've found that it doesn't quite come close to being an "ffmpeg" of text document/book formats. Even Calibre's ebook-convert is better at bidirectional conversion support.
Still, it is pretty neat that this all runs in the browser! I'll have to remember that this exists
We use Pandoc at my workplace to convert old Word documents to Asciidoc. It's not perfect, but gets you 80% of the way there. Having to install and run it locally was always a hurdle for the less technical people, so this is a pretty nice development. :)
I use it for technocal papers, letting me write the text vody in markdown which is nice for rough drafts and notes, and then converting it to paper or hypertext format through either latex->pdf or html with css. Great for writing text intended for multiple formats.
Don't know if I'll be using the online tool much, but it's that it's there (and is now also in my bookmarks).
kacey | 23 hours ago
Hah; I helped a bit with this! Funny to see it pop up on Tildes. The maintainer was having a spot of trouble with some tricky cross-compilation flags and snafus, so I lent them a hand while the other contributor was taking a break. It was incidental to some other work I'm messing around with: putting together a browser-local file converter per this thread a while back.
I guess, if anyone has any common file conversions/operations that they figure would be useful, please feel free to prod me! Right now I'm targeting ffmpeg, imagemagick, libreoffice, pandoc (ofc), and 7z, but I might take a swing at ebook-converter/calibre if there's interest (and I can stomach the toolchain).
Weldawadyathink | 22 hours ago
I would understand if you want to stay away for legal reasons, but browser based drm removal would be awesome. I just had to download and install calibre with drmtools just to remove the adobe drm from books I legally purchased (interesting how I don’t have to jump through crazy hoops for the books I don’t purchase). I don’t use calibre for anything else, and it would be nice to have these as standalone tools.
kacey | 21 hours ago
Yeah, unfortunately I can't facilitate that -- as you note, it's extremely illegal in Canada, with some very specific exemptions. Apologies; I have no desire to attract undue judiciary wrath on a side project 😅
Weldawadyathink | 21 hours ago
Yeah, I totally understand. It’s just so frustrating that paying customers get a much worse experience. Anyways props on getting these tools to work on the web!
kacey | 20 hours ago
I hope someone else cracks that nut, though; I'm certainly no fan of DRM!
(and fwiw I only played a reaaaallly small part; I'd imagine this would've happened without me, too. But it was nice to contribute to something people liked, for once!)
Nsutdwa | 10 hours ago
Even my punctilious sibling accepted high-quality rips that I had downloaded of CDs and DVDs that he had bought fair and square.
Toric | 9 hours ago
so I can see ffmpeg, imagemagik, and pandoc, and kinda 7z (its the closest thing linux has to a universal archive handler), but why libreoffice?
kacey | 4 hours ago
For a handful of somewhat obscure formats, up to and including libreoffice's own! Other file conversion services have shown up in my research for this project, and that one has a nice list of file formats that adding libreoffice would support.
(that said, I've yet to find one that attempts to get everything working in the browser, in wasm! Hopefully I'll be able to shove everything into one, giant wasm lib in the end, so that the world can get a big 'ol GPL'd dynamic library that can convert anything to anything)
xk3 | a day ago
Pandoc claims to be a universal document converter--and it is pretty great for XML, LaTeX, and a few obscure formats--but I've found that it doesn't quite come close to being an "ffmpeg" of text document/book formats. Even Calibre's
ebook-convertis better at bidirectional conversion support.Still, it is pretty neat that this all runs in the browser! I'll have to remember that this exists
Mendanbar | a day ago
We use Pandoc at my workplace to convert old Word documents to Asciidoc. It's not perfect, but gets you 80% of the way there. Having to install and run it locally was always a hurdle for the less technical people, so this is a pretty nice development. :)
DisasterlyDisco | a day ago
I use it for technocal papers, letting me write the text vody in markdown which is nice for rough drafts and notes, and then converting it to paper or hypertext format through either latex->pdf or html with css. Great for writing text intended for multiple formats.
Don't know if I'll be using the online tool much, but it's that it's there (and is now also in my bookmarks).