u/TonyHides

Was reading through an old district gazetteer for research and got sidetracked by this. Kannauj (India) has been distilling attar for centuries, still does today with basically the same copper-still method. The gazetteer talks about it completely matter of fact, like describing the local textile trade.

Real numbers from 1911: a half tola phial of genuine rose otto cost Rs. 25, because it took a whole maund of rose petals to get one tola of the real stuff. They made maybe twenty other scents there too besides rose, jasmine, khaskhas (that's vetiver), orange, mango. Sold in these little inlaid wood boxes with half a dozen to twenty phials each.

What gets me is how unromantic the writing is. No mysticism, no ancient secrets, just a colonial administrator noting down an industry's economics like any other. Akbar's court was using Kannauj attar in the 1590s per the Ain-i-Akbari, so by 1911 this was already a 300+ year old trade and the gazetteer treats it like it's mundane.

Anyone know if the Deg Bhapka distillation method (the copper pot plus bamboo pipe plus receiving vessel setup) has changed much since then? Curious how much of this is genuinely unbroken tradition vs. reconstructed.

Been building olfactionary.com solo -- it catalogs perfumes, brands, materials, and notes with real sourced info (TGSC citations, verified retailer data, no AI-hallucinated "facts"). Just added a materials-to-notes mapping based on actual olfactive profiles instead of name-matching. Would genuinely appreciate feedback from people who work with raw materials day to day.

Been building this for a while - it's a reference site pairing individual raw materials (where they're sourced, what they actually smell like) with the real commercial perfumes that use them, so you can look up e.g. alpha-Bisabolol and see both what it is and which finished perfumes lean on it. Also has perfumer bios and fragrance-family breakdowns. Free, no paywall, still actively growing the data. olfactionary.com/materials.php - feedback very welcome, especially on what's missing.

Been noticing how many "free PDF tool" sites never actually say whether your file gets uploaded to a server or processed locally — just vague words like "secure" and "private" plastered everywhere.

Turns out you can check this yourself in under a minute, on literally any site:

1. Open dev tools (F12), go to the \*\*Network\*\* tab

2. Upload a file and run whatever the tool does

3. Watch the Network tab while it processes

If your file's data goes out in a network request, it's being uploaded somewhere. If nothing shows up, it's happening locally in your browser.

I ended up writing this up in more detail (with some actual documented examples of where a few popular tools process files) after checking a bunch of them myself: \[LINK\]. Full disclosure, I run one of the privacy-focused alternatives mentioned, but the check-it-yourself method works on any site, not just mine — figured it's a useful thing to know regardless of which tool you end up using.

Been noticing how many "free PDF tool" sites never actually say whether your file gets uploaded to a server or processed locally — just vague words like "secure" and "private" plastered everywhere.

Turns out you can check this yourself in under a minute, on literally any site:

1. Open dev tools (F12), go to the **Network** tab

2. Upload a file and run whatever the tool does

3. Watch the Network tab while it processes

If your file's data goes out in a network request, it's being uploaded somewhere. If nothing shows up, it's happening locally in your browser.

I ended up writing this up in more detail (with some actual documented examples of where a few popular tools process files) after checking a bunch of them myself: [LINK]. Full disclosure, I run one of the privacy-focused alternatives mentioned, but the check-it-yourself method works on any site, not just mine — figured it's a useful thing to know regardless of which tool you end up using.

I'm a solo, non-technical founder, and I just wrapped up launching FormatDog on Product Hunt. Wanted to share both the product and the honest results, since I think the "how it actually went" part is more useful to this community than just a launch announcement.

The product: every "free" PDF tool online works the same way — upload your file to their server, wait, download the result, trust it gets deleted. That always bugged me, especially for anything sensitive (bank statements, IDs, contracts). So I built FormatDog around one rule: every one of its 32 tools runs 100% client-side, in your browser, using WebAssembly. Nothing you select ever gets uploaded — you can verify this yourself by watching your browser's Network tab while using any tool.

The honest part: my PH launch was modest — I didn't have a pre-built audience or a list of people lined up to support on day one, and the data on successful launches makes it pretty clear that's the actual biggest lever, not the product itself. Landed outside the top rankings. Still, real people found it, left genuine feedback, and it's been a good forcing function to keep improving the thing.

Happy to answer questions about the build (client-side WASM/OCR/OpenCV stuff was a fun rabbit hole), the launch process, or just talk shop with anyone else who's been through this. Link's in my profile/comments if anyone wants to poke at it — genuinely curious what a Reddit crowd makes of it versus the PH crowd.