Got tired of online document converters tracking me, so I built a local one for macOS
So I got tired of uploading documents to online converters every time I needed a PDF turned into a DOCX or vice versa. Most of them require an email, run third-party trackers, or have ToS that lets them store your files. Even the "free" ones are doing things like 600+ cookies and full session recording before you've uploaded anything.
So I built DropConvert, a small macOS menu-bar app that does conversions locally. You drag a file onto the menu bar icon, the converted file appears next to the original. No cloud round-trip, no save dialog by default.
What it does:
- PDF ↔ DOCX (with OCR fallback for scanned PDFs via Apple Vision)
- PPTX, XLSX, ODT, ODS, ODP, RTF, CSV, TXT converts between most of the office formats
- Images: PNG, JPG, HEIC, WebP (read), TIFF, BMP via ImageIO
- Global hotkey (⌘⇧C) to convert whatever's selected in Finder
How the FOSS-ness works:
- License: MIT
- The app itself is ~200 KB. Office conversions use LibreOffice headless under the hood (MPL 2.0), which the app downloads on first conversion and caches in ~/Library/Application Support. After that, you can pull the network cable and everything still works.
- No analytics, no telemetry, no account, no first-run "create an account" wall. I wanted to be able to hand this to my parents.
Honest caveats:
- Apple Silicon only right now (no Intel build). macOS 13+.
- Not Apple-notarized yet (the $99/yr dev account isn't worth it until I know people actually use this). On first launch you'll get the Gatekeeper "unidentified developer" dialog and need to right-click → Open once. README walks through it.
- Office conversions inherit any quirks LibreOffice has with the file. It's not magic.
Repo (MIT, all Swift): https://github.com/CodeBoss-dev/DropConvert
I'm the dev. Happy to answer anything about architecture, the FOSS engine split, or why I went SwiftPM-without-Xcode.
Genuinely interested in what conversions break — if you have a weird DOCX that no online tool gets right, please throw it at this and tell me what happens.