DiRT (Digital Research Tools) has a new home! Please visit Bamboo DiRT to explore this excellent collection of research tools.

Definition:  

There are some handy programs available that help you convert, download, and otherwise manipulate files.

Tools:

• DownThemAll: "a powerful yet easy-to-use Mozilla Firefox extension that adds new advanced download capabilities to your browser.

  DownThemAll lets you download all the links or images contained in a webpage and much more: you can refine your downloads by fully customizable criteria to get only what you really want." (Free, Firefox-based)

• Free .pdf to .doc converter: software that converts PDF (*.pdf) files to Word (*.doc) files (Free; Windows, via Lifehacker)
• Gnu Wget: "a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc." (Free, cross-platform)
• irfanView [Review]: an easy-to-use image editor and viewer; nice conversion features (Free, PC)
• Lemon8-XML: "a web-based service designed to make it easier for non-technical editors and authors to convert scholarly papers from typical word-processor editing formats such as MS-Word .DOC and OpenOffice .ODT, into publishing layout formats such as the open, industry-standard NLM Journal Publishing XML format." (Free, web-based)
• PDFCreator: Create PDF and PDF/A files; merge files; encrypt PDFs (Open source, Windows)
• PDFMiner: "a suite of programs that help extracting some meaningful information out of PDF documents." (Open source, cross-platform)
• PDFMyURL: Convert a web page to a PDF in seconds. (Free, web-based)
• PDFsam: Split and manipulate PDF files (Open source, cross-platform)
• PDFtk: PDF manipulations including merging, splitting, extracting, and rotating pages (Open source, cross-platform)
• Sort My List: a text alphabetization, sorting, and reformatting tool to allow painless rearrangement and cleanup of blocks of text (Free, web-based)
• Tofu: Reformats text so that it appears in horizontal columns rather than scrolling vertically.  Display text according to your preferences. Navigate using voice commands. (Free, Mac)
• Transformer [Review]: Perform search/replace operations in text files, with output in Unicode; useful for converting/"rescuing" data from files created by obsolete word processing programs (Free, Windows)
• Zamzar: Convert files (up to 1GB) in a simple online interface and receive the results by email (Free, web-based)

Resources:

See Also: