Text & PDF
Text and PDF guides for editing, comparing, converting, merging, compressing, Markdown writing, OCR, and document workflows.
Articles in Text & PDF
- Markdown Editor Rendering Pipeline, Keystroke to HTML
The preview pane of a Markdown editor updates on every keystroke. That immediacy hides a pipeline with exactly two parser options, and both options change how your text renders on other platforms. This is the pipeline in our own Markdown editor, stage by stage, including the two failure modes we acc
- Text Diff Algorithms Compared, LCS vs Myers
Every diff tool promises to show what changed. The algorithm underneath decides how small the change looks, how fast the tab responds, and what a rewritten line costs you. Git ships the Myers algorithm. Our text diff checker ships the classic longest common subsequence dynamic program. Here is both,
- Bold Text Generator Unicode Math: Eight Style Blocks and Thirteen Exceptions
Type hello into a bold text generator, copy the bold result back into a search box, and you get zero matches. The styled word consists of different code points than the one you typed. That single fact explains most failures people hit with Unicode text styles, so this article documents the exact map
- Small Caps Generator Character Coverage: Real Glyphs, Stand-Ins, and Gaps
A small caps generator that claims to convert your text oversells what Unicode can do. The Unicode standard simply lacks glyphs for several letters in several styles. We audited every map in our own small caps generator, and this article reports the exact coverage, including the one letter that gets
- Upside Down Text Generator Quirks: Borrowed Glyphs, Bracket Logic, and Zalgo Counts
Upside down text is not rotated. It is a substitution cipher followed by a string reversal, built from whatever glyphs Unicode happens to offer. We opened the map inside our own upside down text generator and counted every entry, and the results explain why flipped text looks convincing for some wor
- Text Tools Case Operations: Eight Transforms and Their Edge Cases
A case converter that works on a two-word sample tells you nothing. What matters is what it does to a contraction, to an accented word, and to a list with hundreds of near-duplicate lines. Our text tools page runs eight transforms and six live counters, and this article documents where each one beha
- Nickname Generator Combination Space: 16 Styles and One Chaining Rule
Paste a transformed nick back into the generator, apply a second style, and nothing happens. Paste the same nick into a game chat and you may see rows of empty boxes. Both failures trace to specific lines in the transformation code, so we read all 16 style maps in the nickname generator and worked o
