Hacker News Reader

Comment by slowenough | Hacker News Reader

Actually it just uses ImageMagick and soffice under the hood, so it can do way more than PDF. I've tested it with DOC, DOCX, XLS, and they all seem to work.

Edit: in case anyone wants an example, here's the conversion of tesla-model-s.pdf[0]:

https://secureview.cloudbrowser.xyz/uploads/filekat9.v05lnle...

[0]: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/tesla-model-s.pdf

View on HN

Sorry, I'm afraid I just cleaned the upload directory. HN, you have converted 1.6G of files.

Here's that Tesla example link again:

https://secureview.cloudbrowser.xyz/uploads/file5rc5.9nhts2j...

Forgive me, I've cleaned the uploads directory again. Over 3.5G of files converted.

Here's that Tesla link (I'm making it permanent now):

https://secureview.cloudbrowser.xyz/uploads/filecp9z.ohbtt6u...

Sounds like you need to auto-clean your uploads directory

Nice. What is your tech stack to serve it?

Just a digital ocean droplet running FreeBSD, then PM2 running Node.JS and ImageMagick built with multicore support.

ImageMagick with "multicore" support won't speed things up the moment number of concurrent requests touches the number of cores you have. And in digital ocean's case you have only one core.

Actually I created a Droplet with 6 cores

But remember that multi-threading was shown to improve performance in the era of single-core computers.

Sure, but if your concurrent number of fully tendered requests at least sometimes dips below the number of cores, it is a big win.

(At the possible cost of top-end scale; improving response to normal workload significantly and hurting the top workload reachable somewhat).

One wonders if you can WASM-ify ImageMagick and the use a JS FileReader and a canvas or other PNG output approach to do this all client side. Hrmm, I might tackle this myself if I get the time...

Looks like someone has gotten pretty far WASM-ifying ImageMagick already [1]!

[1]: https://github.com/KnicKnic/WASM-ImageMagick

Github? I would love to contribute.

Yep, I just put it up now

https://github.com/crislin2046/p2.

Note that HN (and probably many others) won't correctly autolink URLs with a period at the end. It's also somewhat confusing. You may want to consider removing it.

Oh! Sorry. Let me change that

http://tiny.cc/p2github

edit: I like the dot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Package it as a docker image and you can then run it on cloud.run (Might be expensive though).

Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud.

Hey, this is actually atop FreeBSD so it is not as simple as just making a Dockerfile.

It should be too much tho, perhaps just making an install_deps.sh script alternative to use apt, and writing a Dockerfile.

You're welcome to submit a PR but I might get to it first.

Edit: I just made some changes relating to this, including a Dockerfile. I have not tested in Docker, but it now works on Nix (Debian)

what's your experience running soffice server-side? I might have to do this soon, and I'm dreading it.

My experience is relatively small.

The `convert` script of ImageMagick calls soffice by default if the input file is a LibreOffice type.

I actually started writing a shell script to detect if it was DOCX etc, and run soffice first, but then I found out that ImageMagick does that automatically, if libreoffice is installed.

hmm, OK, I didn't know that. Thanks that's useful :)

Be interesting to see how your demo site holds up under HN front page traffic - I know Imagemagic is used a lot for random web sites, but I worry about scale a lot. Any info would be useful!

no probs. if you want to email me I can let you know once it all quiets down.

sent :)

It's actually not too bad. You can run a pool of soffice processes, but unless you really care about the startup time, I'd suggest running individual processes per job, which you can run headless from the command line. For the most part libreoffice does well, although at some point you'll start to discover the quirks in their rendering...

We’ve been running it as part of alfresco. It’s not very stable and hangs every few weeks. Since we kill it every night we didn’t notice any problems.

good tip, thanks

Does it support SVG?

as an output format?

I wondered about input format.

Hey, yeah I think it doesn't support fully on the input end, but it does support on the output (if you change the $format variable in the convert script).

Input looks a bit weird, for example,

https://secureview.cloudbrowser.xyz/uploads/file1tda.4paa65d...

Which is from:

https://dev.w3.org/SVG/tools/svgweb/samples/svg-files/AJ_Dig...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com