One of the problems with working remotely is receiving a file in a format that the apps that you use don’t understand, or having colleagues request files in a format that the apps you use can’t generate. Fortunately there are several excellent document conversion tools available that can solve these problems for you; having a selection of such tools available can be very handy. For converting text documents, one of my favorite tools is Pandoc. It’s an open-source command-line tool that can convert between many of the most popular markup formats, enabling you to convert many types of document with ease. Input formats include markdown, reStructuredText, HTML and LaTeX, while output formats include HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, S5, DocBook, groff man, reStructuredText, markdown and RTF.
You can try Pandoc online, but to get the most out of it you’ll need to install it on your system and use it from the command line. Pandoc written in Haskell and available for Windows (via a Windows installer), Mac (in the Macports repository) and in the Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch, NetBSD, and FreeBSD ports repositories. A detailed user’s guide is also available.
If you’re looking for a less specialized file conversion tool that doesn’t run from the command line, you might like to check out online-convert.com, a free online file conversion tool that I wrote about previously that can convert between dozens of audio, video, image and document formats.


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