The-BEST-way-to-convert-files

The best way to convert files on your computer, be it .pdf to .png, .pdf to .docx, .png to .ico, or anything you can imagine.

Goal?

Are you sick and tired of going to an online website to convert certain documents?

The tedious process, and the length you have to go through has driven me up the wall.

I made a gist a while ago explaining how you can do this through the CLI, which don't get me wrong is a great way to do it if you have a terminal on hand. But I found an even better way to do this.

I will be using the same script/converter in the gist mentioned above just for simplicity sake, the same applies to ANY file conversion you can think of.

How?

Context Menus.

NOTE This is WINDOWS SPECIFIC!

How can we add to the context menu? The answer is in EcMenu. It's free, and it works super well!

Let's go over how to set up a python script and run that through the Context Menu.

Setup

Any conversion script has these requirements:

What do we need?

1. Convert file from something TO something else.
   • This doesn't need to be spesfically .png to .ico. It can be a fairly complex conversion, say .pdf to images.
2. Input file
   • We need to get the input file we want to convert, the rest is handled by the script.
3. Current directory
   • We need the directory of the file you want to convert. This way the program works no matter where the file is located. Alternativly you can set a CONSTANT output directory if you so please in the script itself. For this example we will be working in the directory of where the file is located itself.

Setting up python script

main.py

# Required libraries
import sys, os

def convert(file_name: str, output_dir: str):
    ...

# Get the file name
file_name: str = sys.argv[-1].split('\\')[-1]

# Get directory of where the file is located 
directory_of_file: str = os.getcwd()

# Start the conversion process
convert(file_name, directory_of_file)

How do we run this? Why are we not using argparse?

To run this script we do: python main.py this_is_my_file.txt

We don't use areparse because we can't directly add arguments to the context menu. argparse we need a -f this_is_my_file.txt to specify the file, but we don't need that, we know we input only one file, so we can just use sys.

sys.argv[-1].split('\\')[-1] This gives us the file that you right clicked on.

We then need compile the python script using:

pyinstaller -F pdftoword.py

In this script i'm using the terminal for feedback, you can use what ever you want, you can use tkinter, qt, or not give anyfeed back at all, to do that simply use:

pyinstaller -F --noconsole pdftoword.py

The .exe will be in a dist directory where you the python script is located.

Addying the python script to the context menu.

1. Get EcMenu
2. Go to list Editor

3. Scroll down to File Context Menu

4. Make sure you select File Context Menu and press Add New and Browse to where the .exe file is located.

5. Press Save Changes

6. Make sure it's checked!

7. Press Apply Changes

And your done. Right click on any file and you should see it!

Summary

This is just a 'quality of life' solution. You can go above and beyond with this method of converting files, you can add a whole suite of file conversions if you so want too.