Hello from a fellow traveler — and a future offer of test data

[DimitrieVatra]

Hi @shps951023,

I'm Dimitrie. First: genuine respect for what you've built across MiniExcel, MiniWord and now MiniPdf — the benchmark-first culture in MiniPdf especially is rare in free tools, and admirable.

Full transparency about who we are: with a volunteer team I'm building Rendlio, a commercial XLSX→PDF engine aimed at a different niche than yours — audited fidelity for compliance-critical conversion (deterministic rendering, PDF/A, a machine-readable report on every conversion). And one thing that makes us an unusual kind of "competitor": the engine ships source-available and free in production for anyone under $1M revenue — every release becomes Apache-2.0 open source four years later — while the large companies that do pay fund charities, not shareholders: we're founding a Swiss association whose statutes pledge the profits to good causes. If Rendlio wins, the community gets it free and charities get the money; nobody gets rich. That's part of why we'd genuinely rather collaborate on quality than compete on marketing.

Your README's honest "practical document conversion, not complete Microsoft Office layout compatibility" is exactly the complement to our niche: we recommend MiniExcel in our own documentation, and we intend to keep contributing fixes upstream to your authoring libraries.

The offer — honestly future-tense: we are building a large fidelity test corpus of real-world-shaped workbooks with per-file visual and text scoring. Once it's running, we'd be glad to run MiniPdf through it and share the full per-file reports with you privately — free extra QA from an independent suite. And if we ever publish comparative numbers publicly, you would see them first, before publication, as a standing courtesy.

If that interests you, say the word and we'll follow up when the harness is live. Either way — thanks for MiniExcel; it's part of our recommended stack. And if the model ever resonates, our repos are open too.

— Dimitrie Vatra · hello@rendlio.com

[shps951023]

It's my pleasure
Please keep going, and feel free to contact me
🙌🙌🙌 @DimitrieVatra