Let me tell you a little bit about all those various file converter tools, be it ffmpeg, pandoc, imagemagick, whatever.
The majority of them can be used like this: magick inputfile.bmp outputfile.jpg. If all you need is this file in that format, that’s how you do it. They’re ridicluously capable, you can do editing and compositing and such with them and whatever. If you have a use case where you do that a lot, like you just always put a watermark on images or you always desaturate them or whatever, you can write a script, then just run that script.
They’re basically all like that. Fairly simple to use for basic format translation, shockingly capable if you want to write a script.
You do you, I guess. Those are incredibly simple commands I provided, and you can intuit pretty easily how to tweak them for other formats.
I guess it’s up to you. You can gamble with random services online, or you can spend a few minutes and learn to use a tool that’s all but guaranteed to not have malware.
This is just a fucking lie and I’m tired of hearing it. What did I just say?
I’ve lost far too many hours to the CLI.
I’ve tried to learn this shit. It’s a fucking rabbit hole. I type these commands, letter for letter, the terminal returns some completely useless error that provides me with no diagnostic information whatsoever, I spend hours searching and trying to understand why and come up empty-handed. I don’t have time for that anymore. I already have multiple jobs. It’s not how I prefer to spend my free time. And frankly, I don’t believe it anymore when software engineers feed me this bullshit.
You know what those web services do? I just click a button and it does what the button says. Why is that so hard?
I understand that but that’s beside the point. It does what they advertise. It’s incredibly simple and easy to use. Why can no one make something comparable that’s FOSS?
They did, it’s often a CLI interface because it’s incredibly flexible. ffmpeg and imagemagick are quite easy for basic things.
Building a cross-platform GUI is a pain, and hosting a website costs money. Building a cross-platform CLI is incredibly easy, which is why it’s so popular.
Some of these tools have GUI frontends or alternatives, some don’t. The more niche you go, the harder it’ll be to find a reasonable GUI, and I consider PDF to JPEG pretty niche.
I didn’t put the “and” in the commands, I copied and pasted them from the comment above
Yes you did, but you copy pasted two different commands connected with “and”.
The word “and” isn’t meant to be typed into the cli. They’re stringing together two different lines.
but thank you for illustrating my point so very well.
If your point was that it’s easy to copy and paste I’m confused how I helped.
It is easy to copy and paste though. People generally format the commands like I did instead of in the middle of a sentence like OP did where you can make parsing mistakes.
The terminal? Your post history suggests you are quite familiar with Linux. But I agree that those who are most prone to use random file conversion sites because they need something as PDF for work will be very confused by those instructions.
I am familiar with Linux but I avoid it whenever possible. I dailyed it for a couple of years but I’ve unfortunately moved on to Mac due to their deep dependency on terminal. If I have a problem and go and look up support, 99% of the time the advice is to open the terminal and start running commands, which is almost never the case for Windows or Mac. I’ve been using a Mac for about a year and I don’t even know where the terminal is. Even where there’s a perfectly suitable GUI solution, they’ll send you into the terminal anyway. Linux is made by and for devs and it is and will remain that way until the mentality of it’s creators change. And I am not a dev.
I can follow instructions. The problem is #1 I’m told “don’t type commands you don’t understand” and #2 no one ever explains what any of these commands do, so I never learn anything, and #3 the commands don’t work, and they return a generic error with zero diagnostic information, or sometimes just nothing at all happens. I don’t have time for that. I just want something that works.
FFmpeg and handbrake do the latter two quite handily. The latter even has a nice program interface, rather than needing commands.
ImageMagick is capable of the first. I’ve had it go the other way before, and I should be most surprised if it couldn’t convert a PDF to a jpg.
I don’t have the knowledge or the time to learn to use these tools.
Then I suppose you’re up shit creek.
Thanks for that deep analysis.
Let me tell you a little bit about all those various file converter tools, be it ffmpeg, pandoc, imagemagick, whatever.
The majority of them can be used like this:
magick inputfile.bmp outputfile.jpg.If all you need is this file in that format, that’s how you do it. They’re ridicluously capable, you can do editing and compositing and such with them and whatever. If you have a use case where you do that a lot, like you just always put a watermark on images or you always desaturate them or whatever, you can write a script, then just run that script.They’re basically all like that. Fairly simple to use for basic format translation, shockingly capable if you want to write a script.
magick inputfile.bmp outputfile.jpg.
I don’t think it worked.
They’re command line tools. If you want to get something done you have to put in a little effort.
Strange, those online tools don’t require any “effort”.
Handbrake has a GUI, and it’s relatively straightforward to use. VLC also works well. You can also use ffmpeg on the CLI like so:
imagemagick isn’t really that hard, in most cases it’s:
For example:
If that doesn’t work, try
pdftoppm:I don’t know of a good GUI for it, I recommend just learning to use either imagemagick or pdftoppm.
I downloaded it and it immediately did not work so I’m gonna have to disagree with you there, champ.
I’ve lost far too many hours to the CLI. I don’t fall for that trick anymore.
You do you, I guess. Those are incredibly simple commands I provided, and you can intuit pretty easily how to tweak them for other formats.
I guess it’s up to you. You can gamble with random services online, or you can spend a few minutes and learn to use a tool that’s all but guaranteed to not have malware.
This is just a fucking lie and I’m tired of hearing it. What did I just say?
I’ve tried to learn this shit. It’s a fucking rabbit hole. I type these commands, letter for letter, the terminal returns some completely useless error that provides me with no diagnostic information whatsoever, I spend hours searching and trying to understand why and come up empty-handed. I don’t have time for that anymore. I already have multiple jobs. It’s not how I prefer to spend my free time. And frankly, I don’t believe it anymore when software engineers feed me this bullshit.
You know what those web services do? I just click a button and it does what the button says. Why is that so hard?
There’s also a pretty big chance that they’ll do more than what the button says, like inject malware. That’s the whole point of the article.
I understand that but that’s beside the point. It does what they advertise. It’s incredibly simple and easy to use. Why can no one make something comparable that’s FOSS?
They did, it’s often a CLI interface because it’s incredibly flexible. ffmpeg and imagemagick are quite easy for basic things.
Building a cross-platform GUI is a pain, and hosting a website costs money. Building a cross-platform CLI is incredibly easy, which is why it’s so popular.
Some of these tools have GUI frontends or alternatives, some don’t. The more niche you go, the harder it’ll be to find a reasonable GUI, and I consider PDF to JPEG pretty niche.
It is indeed very difficult to type convert 001.jpg example.pdf and ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi
convert 001.jpg example.pdf and ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi
Lol, apparently it is hard. You were supposed to enter
And
By putting the “and” in the commands you just caused an error lol
I didn’t put the “and” in the commands, I copied and pasted them from the comment above, but thank you for illustrating my point so very well.
Yes you did, but you copy pasted two different commands connected with “and”.
The word “and” isn’t meant to be typed into the cli. They’re stringing together two different lines.
If your point was that it’s easy to copy and paste I’m confused how I helped.
It is easy to copy and paste though. People generally format the commands like I did instead of in the middle of a sentence like OP did where you can make parsing mistakes.
My point is that if I had followed the instructions it wouldn’t have worked. Which is what always happens.
Right, but I just pointed out to you why it wouldn’t work and how to fix it.
So if you had followed my instructions they would have worked.
okay, now what?
TYPE IT WHERE!? WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS INFORMATION!? How are you so completely unaware of how non-sensical this information is?
The terminal? Your post history suggests you are quite familiar with Linux. But I agree that those who are most prone to use random file conversion sites because they need something as PDF for work will be very confused by those instructions.
I am familiar with Linux but I avoid it whenever possible. I dailyed it for a couple of years but I’ve unfortunately moved on to Mac due to their deep dependency on terminal. If I have a problem and go and look up support, 99% of the time the advice is to open the terminal and start running commands, which is almost never the case for Windows or Mac. I’ve been using a Mac for about a year and I don’t even know where the terminal is. Even where there’s a perfectly suitable GUI solution, they’ll send you into the terminal anyway. Linux is made by and for devs and it is and will remain that way until the mentality of it’s creators change. And I am not a dev.
I can follow instructions. The problem is #1 I’m told “don’t type commands you don’t understand” and #2 no one ever explains what any of these commands do, so I never learn anything, and #3 the commands don’t work, and they return a generic error with zero diagnostic information, or sometimes just nothing at all happens. I don’t have time for that. I just want something that works.