Guides & tutorials
Background reading for the tools on this site — what each format actually does, why conversions lose information, and how to get the result you wanted.
PDF Tools
How to Convert PDF to Word: What Survives, and What Does Not
"Convert PDF to Word without losing formatting" is a promise nobody can keep, including us. Some formatting always goes, and which parts go…
8 min readPDF Table Extraction: Why It Fails, and What Works Instead
Copy a table out of a PDF, paste it into a spreadsheet, and you get one long column of run-together text. Every value is there. The grid is…
8 min read
Image Tools
Text Utilities
Developer Tools
JSON vs XML: What a Round Trip Between Them Actually Loses
Most comparisons of these two formats put a syntax sample of each side by side, note that XML has more characters in it, and stop. That is…
8 min readHow to Format JSON, and the Errors Formatting Cannot Fix
Formatting JSON is a solved problem. Paste it somewhere, pick an indent, done. The part that costs people an afternoon is when the…
8 min readRegex Explained: Where the Syntax Quietly Misleads You
Regex has a reputation for being unreadable, and it is earned — but not for the reason people usually give. The syntax is small. You can…
8 min readCron Expression Syntax, and the Rules That Misfire Jobs
A cron expression is five fields and about six punctuation rules. The whole grammar fits on a postcard, and almost nobody gets bitten by…
8 min read
Encoding / Security
Base64 Encoding Explained: What Actually Happens to Your Bytes
Every JWT you have ever seen starts with the letters eyJ. Every one. That is not a version marker or a convention — it falls out of the…
8 min readWhy URL Parameters Break: %20, +, and %2520
You send someone a link. It arrives in two pieces: a clickable part that 404s, and a few words of plain grey text trailing after it. The…
8 min read
SEO Tools
Robots.txt Disallow Rules: What They Actually Control
robots.txt does not tell Google what to index. It tells crawlers what they may fetch. Those are two different things, and nearly every…
8 min readXML Sitemap Best Practices: What Google Reads and What It Throws Away
A sitemap does one job: it hands a crawler a list of URLs it might not otherwise find. That is the entire mechanism. It does not make pages…
7 min read