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Rudoc

a 4.5MB Rust document converter

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I built Rudoc because I wanted a smaller tool for simple file convertion workflow. (Pandoc was so heavy for me) I once wanted to try Pandoc, but after I downloaded it from GitHub, I found that it is around 70 MB. It also needed a lot of dependencies.Rudoc is not a substitue of Pandoc, it supports limited set of formats (only txt, md, html, typ, docx, pdf, pptx, xml, json) and doesn't support advanced formatting. The most common workflow is just turn a markdown file to a html. PDF generation can work without Typst, but PDF input conversion requires Typst as a backend. It has no other runtime dependencies and can run as a single binary, by the way.It is pretty easy to use, just use the format of rudoc input.file output.file One sample usage is like this: ```powershell rudoc OhPDF_ROADMAP.md.txt r.md [rudoc] OhPDF_ROADMAP.md.txt → r.md (txt→md) [rudoc] done in 52ms (6286 bytes) rudoc r.md r.html [rudoc] r.md → r.html (md→html) [rudoc] done in 4ms (7363 bytes) ```Some complex formats (such as pptx) still have limited compatibility. I planned to add standard error messages and better format compatibilities. I'd be pleased to see feedback or issues on my project.QA: Why not Pandoc? Pandoc is a great tool, but sometimes we only need a convenient little one to handle common conversion tasks.How compatible is it to docx/pptx? Currently it supports basic text conversion, and I'm trying to make it be able to keep advanced formatting.

HN · launched Jul 25, 2026 · 17 upvotes (top 33%) · 0 views

Niche: document and file conversion tools · 216 launches, 24 in the last 7 days ▼ -4% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Workflow automation
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes A lightweight document converter in Rust can be assembled using existing parser and renderer crates like pulldown-cmark and printpdf.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Pandoc

Concerns raised: Pandoc binary size too large for simple conversions

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 662 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #204 of 663 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 264 days after the earliest competitor.

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