Converting files

Select a file and press Convert in the toolbar, or right-click it. A single file offers Convert to with the likeliest targets straight in the menu; when there are more than eight, the last entry (All, followed by how many there are) opens the full panel. The panel groups every format the file can become by kind (image, vector, document, spreadsheet, audio, video, subtitles), and when there are more than ten a search box finds one by its extension or its name. Under Settings each format you picked shows the options it supports, such as quality, resolution, bitrate, which pages of a PDF or which sheet of a workbook; anything you leave alone uses the format's own default. For an image you can set a width, a height or both: with one of them the picture keeps its shape, and with both you choose whether it is stretched to that size, cropped from the middle to fill it, or fitted inside it. Conversion runs on hardware we operate ourselves, so files are not handed to an outside conversion service.

What converts into what#

• Images: JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, BMP, TIFF, GIF, ICO, TGA and PPM, in from HEIC, PSD, SVG and every common RAW format as well. Any picture can also become a PDF, one page per picture, or be traced into an SVG.
• Vector: SVG, into any of the image formats above or into a PDF.
• Video: MP4, WebM, AVI, MOV, MKV, FLV, WMV, M4V, 3GP, MPEG and VOB, in from OGV, TS, MTS, M2TS, MXF, ASF and F4V as well. A video can also become images (one still, or a sequence of frames at a rate you choose), sound, or its subtitles.
• Audio: MP3, WAV, FLAC, AAC, OGG, Opus, M4A, M4B, WMA, AIFF, CAF and MKA, in from ALAC, AC3, APE, WavPack, AU, MP2 and DTS as well.
• Documents: PDF, DOCX, ODT, RTF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, plain text, LaTeX, reStructuredText, Org, Textile, MediaWiki, DokuWiki, Jupyter notebooks, FictionBook, OPML, DocBook and PowerPoint, and out to AsciiDoc too. A PDF becomes text, HTML or images, one per page.
• Spreadsheets and data: CSV, TSV, XLSX, ODS and JSON, in from XLS, XLSM and XLSB as well, and out to an HTML table.
• Subtitles: SRT, WebVTT, ASS and SSA, between each other or taken out of a video.

The panel only ever offers what the file can actually become, so the list for a given file can be shorter than the one above. Most conversions stay within a kind; the ones that cross over are a video into images, sound or subtitles, a picture into a PDF or an SVG, a PDF into images, and a spreadsheet into an HTML table. Converting a spreadsheet into a Nemi Sheet is a different job, done with Open as Nemi Sheet in the right-click menu.

The daily allowance#

Conversions are counted in units rather than in files, because transcoding an hour of video is not the same work as resizing a photograph. The panel shows what a job will cost before you start it and what you have left today.

Picking several output formats multiplies the cost, because each one is a separate conversion. Selecting several files does the same. The allowance belongs to the owner of the workspace you are working in, so converting inside a colleague's workspace spends theirs.

Where the result lands#

The original is never touched or replaced. When one job produces several files they arrive as a single ZIP: several formats or several files at once, a video turned into a frame sequence, several pages of a PDF turned into images, or every sheet of a workbook turned into CSV. The panel names the file that arrived once it is done.

While a job runs the panel shows where it is: a video or audio encode reports how far through the file it has got, a job with several formats or several files names the one being worked on, and packaging the result counts up the files as they go in. Photos taken on a phone keep their orientation, and a file whose extension does not match its contents is read by what it actually is.

Stopping one, and when it goes wrong#

• A conversion in progress can be cancelled, and a cancelled job costs you no units.
• "The size of this file could not be determined" means the source is not stored in Nemi. Upload it first, then convert it from your workspace.
• A file that exceeds your plan's conversion size is refused before any work starts, so it costs nothing.
• Picking more formats than your plan converts at once is refused the same way. Pick fewer, or run the job in two goes.
• If the conversion service is busy or unreachable you get a plain error and no units are spent. Try again in a few minutes.
• "There is not enough free disk space on the conversion server for this job" means exactly that. The job was refused before it started and costs nothing. Try again later.