Thursday, March 28

Advanced Document Conversions with Filestack

You might know Filestack from being an incredible service to add file uploading, storage, and management to your own web apps.

There is another thing Filestack can do for you: convert documents into different formats.

For one thing, it can manipulate documents. Take images. Perhaps you would like to offer some image manipulation for your users uploaded images, like cropping and rotation. That’s a common feature for apps that offer avatar uploading. With Filestack, you got it.

It’s great to be able to have that kind of functionality without having to build it yourself. You almost surely aren’t in the avatar cropping business, you’re in your own unique business that just happens to have users with avatars.

I’ve said it before:

Being smart is using a service like Filestack to handle files while you focus on what your app really does.

But let’s up the ante a little bit here. What if you need to get an entirely different document format out of another document? How about the hardest document format at all, feared by web developers everywhere, the Microsoft Word document format! ?

Filestack has you covered! Say you have an invoice document created in Word and you need it as a PDF. But a perfect PDF, not some hack job conversion. And you need to do it programmatically. That’s tricky stuff, and Filestack has solved it.

Of course, it isn’t just Microsoft Word document formats, they have a whole matrix of in’s and out’s.

See full size

Just about any file format conversion you need, they got. Personally, I’m impressed by the idea that conversion between PDF and SVG maintains the vectors in both directions.

Document security is a prime concern of course and is handled through policy and signature validation.

See their security docs for all things security related.

Need a way to show users files like PDFs? Browsers can view PDFs, but only as a whole, not embedded into regular web pages. Not a problem with the document viewer!

If you think Filestack might solve some problems for your app, like transforming files, check out their getting started guide.

The post Advanced Document Conversions with Filestack appeared first on CSS-Tricks.


Source: CSS-tricks.com

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