Universal File Converter

A production-grade, extensible desktop application for converting files. Currently supports DOCX and PDF to TXT conversion, with a scalable plugin architecture for future formats.

Features

• Responsive GUI: Built with standard tkinter (ttk), scales gracefully.
• Multilingual: Supports standard fallback mechanism (en-US, zh-TW).
• Format Conversion: Convert .docx and .pdf files containing paragraphs, tables, headers, and footers.
• Table Handling: Normalizes irregular tables, supports TSV or Pipe formats.
• Output Chunking: Split long output into smaller parts for web uploads.
• Headless CLI: Automate conversions via command line.
• Scalable Architecture: Everything is a plugin. Add Markdown, Excel, or other format support without touching the core engine.

Installation for Development

1. Prerequisites: Python 3.9+
2. Install:

   pip install -e .[dev]

3. Run GUI:

   ufc
   # or
   python src/ufc/app.py

CLI Usage

ufc convert --in-type docx --out-type txt --lang zh-TW --output-dir ./out sample.docx

Run ufc convert --help to see all available options.

Testing

Uses pytest for unit and end-to-end tests:

pytest -v tests/

Packaging for Release

You can build a standalone executable using PyInstaller.

1. Make sure PyInstaller is installed (pip install -e .[build]).
2. Run the build script:

python scripts/build_exe.py

3. The standalone .exe will be located in the dist folder.

Packaging Plan & Security Note

• Configs: User config is saved cleanly to ~/.universal_file_converter.json.
• Telemetry: This application contains zero telemetry, analytics, or hidden behavior.
• Logs: No log files are left behind maliciously. All operations happen in-memory or are directly written to the user-specified folder.