File Format Converter

Overview

This is a personal project that I started in order to learn and become more familiar with C and some of its more unique aspects, such as dynamic memory management and structures. As of this version, this code can read PNGs and JPEGs into their own specially-made structures and write them from said structures. You can also find the start of similar progress being made for TIFF files as well.

How to Use

In its current form, this project does not have the necessary files in it to help you setup this tool globally on your system. However, you can still use this tool by either installing it locally yourself or by just referring to the executable file by its path. Download the repository and run the following command in the root directory of the project:

make

Once you have this, you can run the program by using the following command:

./ffc

You can also run one of these help commands to see what options are currently available:

./ffc -h
./ffc --help

The Current Next Step

As of right now, I am looking into how to algorithmically generate a JPEG from a PNG and vice versa. This will be the first major step in the "converter" part of this project. I honestly thought it couldn't be that hard to do when I started this project. I know now that I was quite wrong, mostly because there is not a lot of documentation or explanation about the process itself.

Possible Blog or Tutorial

In doing research for this project, I was never able to find a good place to find information to accomplish tasks like this. Because of that lack of information on the Internet, there is the potential that I will create a blog about what I am working on in this project on my website. Or, as an alternative, it might be more of a tutorial-style thing that just walks through my thought process and why I chose to do things the way I did.

Hope for this Project

Eventually, I hope to dedicate enough time to this to make it an all-in-one CLI file format converting tool that is capable of all of the common file formats (and maybe even some uncommon ones). As a part of that, I might even be creating my own specifications for a generic "data" file format in order to increase the modularity within the code itself. And if I get real crazy with it, I might even be creating a GUI that utilizes this program so that all users can comfortably use the program without feeling the need to open a terminal.