What's new
A catalogue is never dated, a log always is. The real dates live here.
The banner tells the truth about measurement, and the counting page leaves
The black banner at the top of every page claimed there was no audience measurement here at all, with no qualification. That was too broad: the site's host counts visits at the edge of the network, without cookies and without placing anything in the pages. The sentence now says exactly that, in all seven languages, and it is copied word for word from the text shared by every site of the association instead of being reworded here.
The page “What gets counted” is withdrawn: its address now leads to the association's traffic page, where counting happens once for all its sites. The counters of this workbench stay published as open data, downloadable from the Settings panel of every page and from the site map.
The site takes on the look shared by every site of the association
The same red, the same two typefaces, the same square corners and the same seal as on the association's other sites, plus the black trust banner at the top of every page. Recognising at a glance that you are with the same house matters more than a decoration of this project's own. No tool changed behaviour, no tool text moved.
Everything that moved merely to decorate is gone: not one animation, not one shadow, not one gradient. What still moves carries information and stays: the veil outside the crop frame, the hatching over the area to blur, the rule of thirds.
Every tile on the board carries its name, spelled out
The board on the home page showed silhouettes and nothing else: the name appeared only under a mouse pointer, so never under a finger. And there are fewer drawings than tools, so one silhouette was designating two different tools. Every tile now carries its tool's name as permanent text, with its function right underneath.
The board also takes two tools per corner instead of the first twelve places on the plan, each corner card leads to its corner of the workshop, the workshop opens on a bar of its six corners, and on a phone the header gives a good part of the first screen back to the content.
A link to the state of the association's services, in the footer
The footer now carries a “Status” link to the association's page that measures, in your own browser, whether each of its services answers. A project LINKS that state; it does not build its own status page: a state shown in six places goes stale in five of them, and a measurement taken at the moment you look at it is worth more.
The Workbench speaks seven languages, and nothing is half translated
Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali and Chinese join French and English. Every tool, every how-to, every page exists in all seven: nothing is left half translated, and a language missing a single sentence would not be published at all rather than served in pieces. Arabic reads right to left, as it should.
On the very first visit, the site goes straight to your browser's language if it is among the seven. After that it never decides again: your choice in the language selector always wins, and it wins for good.
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 34 drawn places, and shows clearly which one is occupied.