any2any - generate and convert files from any format to any format
How do you convert a markdown file into a pdf?
pandoc file.md -o file.pdf
How do you convert an image into a pdf?
magick file.png file.pdf
How do you convert a pdf into text?
pdftotext file.pdf file.txt
How should all of these work?
2 file.anything to file.anything
Additionally, this can create file links, like so:
2 link_name to real_file
as English is a better language to remember how to do this than another random command.
It is unreasonable to expect everyone to know all the commands to do all these; however, there is no reason that you should have to know whether ffmpeg requires -i or -o and in what order. Now, you don't have to.
This script works by checking a defined list of possible transformations. This has 3 limitations.
- If multiple ways to convert one file type into another exist, extra effort is required to support both. As most of the time you just want to be able to do any kind of transformation, and don't care about the minutia of how it happens, this is fine.
- This script cannot easily check if you have the dependencies installed to run a command. But an error message will at least tell you what you need to install in order to do it.
- Someone has to manually go through and define every way to transform one file into another.
Here, (3) is the greatest threat to this program being useful. Thus, it is self-updating; whenever you encounter a file type it does not handle yet, it will prompt you to explain how to convert that and locally save the method. This on its own is not interesting.
It will also automatically create a github pull request, so that anyone else using the script will also get your improvements. Over time, this should mean that all interesting filetypes are convertible.