Format

A tiny macOS utility for document + image work. Drag files in, hit a button.

• Convert between PDF, Markdown, HTML, DOCX, RTF, ODT, EPUB, TXT, LaTeX, PNG, JPEG, WebP, HEIC, TIFF, GIF, BMP.
• Merge PDFs.
• Split PDFs — one file per page, or extract a range.
• PDF Tools — compress, number pages, crop margins.
• Editor — interactive PDF editor with a live preview. Click to place a signature, click to drop text, click on existing text to edit it (font-substituted).
• Remove background from images with Apple's on-device subject-isolation model (macOS 14+).

Native SwiftUI, no analytics, no accounts, no cloud round-trip. Everything runs locally.

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Install

Download the app

Grab the latest Format.zip from Releases, unzip, and move Format.app to your Applications folder.

First launch (Gatekeeper)

Because the app isn't signed with a paid Apple Developer certificate, macOS will refuse the very first launch with something like "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified." Fix once:

• Right-click (or Control-click) Format.app → Open → Open again on the confirmation dialog.

That whitelist entry sticks — from then on, double-click launches normally.

Optional tools

Format does the geometry-only work (PDF merge, PDF → PNG, images → PDF) on its own. The text conversions shell out to open-source CLIs. Install them once:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/olivernox05/formatc/main/setup.sh | bash

Or if you'd rather do it by hand:

brew install pandoc                                # MD ↔ HTML, PDF ↔ DOCX
brew install --cask basictex                       # MD/HTML → PDF (needs sudo)
python3 -m pip install --user pymupdf4llm          # PDF → Markdown

After installing, click Refresh in the status bar at the bottom of the Format window. Each tool's chip turns green as the app detects it.

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What Format can do

Text formats (PDF, Markdown, HTML, DOCX, RTF, ODT, EPUB, TXT, LaTeX) convert any-to-any via pandoc, plus PDF → Markdown via pdf2md.py (better tables than pandoc's PDF reader). Anything → PDF that isn't already goes through xelatex.

Image formats (PNG, JPEG, WebP, HEIC, TIFF, GIF, BMP) convert any-to-any natively via Core Graphics / ImageIO — zero installs.

Cross-category:

• Any image → PDF (bundles into a single-page or multi-page PDF)
• PDF → PNG (rasterizes each page at 200 DPI)
• Any image → transparent PNG with background removed (Vision framework)

Plus PDF merge (drop-and-reorder), PDF split (per-page or range), Edit PDF (compress, number pages, crop margins), and background removal.

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Requirements

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel — the app is a universal binary

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Build from source

If you'd rather build it yourself:

brew install xcodegen                     # one-time
git clone https://github.com/olivernox05/formatc.git
cd formatc/app
xcodegen generate
open FormatC.xcodeproj                    # Cmd-R in Xcode

Or headless:

xcodebuild -project app/FormatC.xcodeproj \
  -scheme FormatC -configuration Release \
  -destination 'platform=macOS' build

To produce a notarized zip that macOS accepts without the right-click → Open dance, do the one-time setup in docs/notarize.md and run ./scripts/release.sh. Without the setup, the script still builds a working local .app — just falls back to ad-hoc signing.

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Under the hood

• SwiftUI + PDFKit for the native operations (app/FormatC/Services/PDFOps.swift, ImagePDFOps.swift)
• Bundles the pdf2md.py script — a heuristic PDF → Markdown converter with table detection, page-furniture stripping, and dehyphenation. Uses pymupdf4llm when available, falls back to pdfplumber.
• Shells out to pandoc for everything Markdown/HTML/DOCX-shaped, with xelatex for the PDF output path.

The app detects each tool at launch and greys out any conversion whose dependency is missing — you never see a scary error, just a chip that hasn't lit up yet.

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License

MIT.