What's new
A catalogue is never dated, a log always is. The real dates live here.
The PDF corner opens, and says what it cannot do
Six tools join the bench: merging PDFs, splitting them or pulling pages out, reordering and rotating pages, making a PDF out of images, seeing and cleaning a PDF's metadata, and putting a PDF under a password or taking it back out.
It is also the first time this site embeds a library, and it will be the only one: writing a PDF by hand is unreasonable. The code is served by us, never by an outside delivery network, its version is frozen into the file name so an update cannot be silent, and its exact weight is measured at every build of the site. We checked that it contains no network call at all, and an automatic check re-verifies that every time.
The PDF metadata cleaner shows something almost no tool shows: a PDF does not keep its metadata in one place, it has three, and the third sits on the pages themselves. It empties all three, then it REOPENS the file it has just produced to tell you what is left.
The password tool displays the encryption REVISION before acting, and that is unusual. PDF knows two ways of doing AES-256, and they do not protect equally: the one we can write does not slow password verification down. We say so on screen, before the click, and we point towards building a real passphrase.
Three things were ruled out, and the method page says why with the numbers: turning a PDF into images (it would take a rendering engine of a megabyte and a half), signing a PDF (without that engine we cannot show the page, so we cannot place a signature on it), and the “forbid printing” checkboxes (those are requests made to the reader, not locks).
The board on the home page now shows only tools that exist: the places still empty have stopped being announced.
The image corner and the security corner open
Four tools join the metadata viewer: compressing and resizing an image, converting an image from one format to another, computing a file's fingerprint and comparing it, and encrypting and decrypting a file with a password.
The image converter does something the converter farms do not: it MEASURES in your browser which formats it can really write, and offers only those. The standard allows a browser to return a PNG without warning when it cannot write what it was asked for, so the type of the file you get is read back and displayed.
The encryption tool shows its full method on screen, with its numbers, before encrypting anything. The password stays visible while you type it, and the page says why: nobody can recover a file whose password has been lost.
The compatibility matrix has been re-checked and CORRECTED: a widely copied line about writing AVIF has no first-hand source at all, and it is now presented as such. Six new lines say what the browser CANNOT do, and a new section states the real condition of the PDF libraries.
Two places in the plan stay empty, and the method page says exactly why, evidence in hand: the password on a PDF, and the QR code.
The workshop opens with its first tool
The Workbench opens with the metadata viewer: drop a photo in, see what it says about you, clean it, download the clean copy. Nothing is sent anywhere.
The site is born in two languages, French and English, at full parity: a file tool has no national anchor.
The compatibility matrix is published and dated: it says, format by format and browser by browser, what is really possible inside a browser, with its sources.
The workshop plan announces thirty-five drawn places, and shows clearly which one is occupied.