A little bit about the history of Doc2PDF
Back in 2004, I was studying electrical engineering at the university. During that period, and still today I believe, the Department of Electrical Engineering was very Open Source friendly. I, along with two friends, managed the computer lab. We oversaw the desktops and servers, their interconnection, configuration and setup. The available budget was small (zero). The only way to utilize the computers was to use free operating systems called Linux and FreeBSD.
That said, the culture was very open source friendly among the students as well. The students wanted to use Linux on their desktops and were happy with it. That is probably the exception at the university, but hey, we were studying electrical engineering and should be able to manage complex operating systems.
Personally I frowned upon Microsoft and the Office package. I was an Open Source zealot. (Now I am a “best tool for the job” follower). The teachers at the university generally gave the assignments in Microsoft Word format (.doc). This, I thought, forced me, a poor student, to buy expensive software just to be able to carry out the assignments. It would have been ok if the format (.doc) was open to everyone, but that was and still is not the case.
I therefore created the website, Doc2PDF, which converted documents from Word to PDF, since you can read PDF on any computer for free. (It also converts PowerPoint and Excel files, as well as converting from PowerPoint to Flash). I sent the department’s director an email suggesting they could use this site and give out the assignments in PDF format. He was very positive and in turn sent the teachers an email about the site.
Thus, Doc2PDF.net was born. First it was hosted on an old desktop PC in my basement, connected to the internet through my parents internet connection (I lived at my parents in those days).
Soon the traffic was too much to handle at home and I moved the site to a hosting company in the USA. Since then I have been forced to upgrade the underlying server several times due to increased traffic. Now about 15.000 visitors use the site each day, converting thousands of documents.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Hey,
This is an awesome site!! Love it.. The speed and accuracy of the conversion is really great. Ardent fan!!
Keep up the good work dude!
Rgds,
J
November 10th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Awsome site, even more awsome software. My dad (nuclear engineer) recommended it to me and he too uses it A LOT (to convert papers mainly). I use it to create pdfs out of designs I do in Corel/Pshp.
The thing is.. I have to export from Corel, then import to Word and then convert it to PDF. The conversion (thanks to you) is the easy part.. but the other part, though easy, is annoying. Plus, the quality drops substantially.
Do you think someday there will exist a site like yours but that converts from CDR to PDF? I would just love that and my life would be so much nicer
Thank you very much for this software, it is TRULY appreciated.
Best regards,
Irene
November 17th, 2009 at 5:41 am
Hi,
I wanted to get in touch with you to ask a question but couldn’t find any contact info, so I thought I’d ask here.
When you use Doc2Pdf.net to convert, say, a Word doc to a pdf, does a copy of either the doc I convert or the pdf that gets created get stored on your servers?
The reason I ask is because I’d like to convert something using your service (I’ve used it before lots of times), but for this particular document, I’d prefer if it–or any version of it–wasn’t stored on your servers or in any of your caches (assuming documents or pdfs do get stored on your servers; if they don’t, then it’s okay).
If you could let me know whether things get stored on your servers, or how it works, that would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Bruce
ps. And thanks for the great service! It’s really handy and easy to use.
November 17th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
good
November 19th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
@Irene: Thanks for your comment. I have no idea if a CDR to PDF converter will be available in the future. I doubt it, because it probably involves a lot of work.
@Jay: Thanks!
@Bruce: When you submit a document to Doc2PDF both the input and output documents get deleted right after the conversion. You can verify it by trying the link that appears in the browser window when the PDF opens. If you copy it to a new tab or a new browser window, it will not find the document.
About the cache, there is always a cache on multiple levels. The web server has its own cache, the conversion engine has its own cache and the operating system has its own cache. This is always the case, also on your computer. So I can’t guarantee that your document does not temporarily reside in some of those caches. The caches get deleted regularly. So I would not say this should be a problem.
Like I state on the web page, the service should not be used for top secret documents. The transmission is not encrypted. If there is demand for encryption, perhaps I will offer that as well.
Thanks for using my site. (BTW, my email address is on the front page).