Converters & Generators

Publishing has a long tail of small format chores. A headline needs to become a URL slug. A blog post written in Markdown needs to become HTML. A design mockup needs placeholder copy that looks like text without saying anything. A debugging session needs to know what numeric codes hide behind a string of strange characters. None of these tasks is hard, and all of them interrupt whatever you were actually doing. This category absorbs the interruptions: seven tools that transform text between formats or generate text you need for structural reasons rather than literary ones.

The converters do the transforming. The case converter switches text between uppercase, lowercase, Title Case, and sentence case, which is how an ALL-CAPS export becomes readable again. The slug generator turns a headline into a clean URL fragment. The markdown-to-html converter renders Markdown source as HTML for systems that will not do it themselves. The text-to-ascii and ascii-to-text tools translate between characters and their numeric codes, the pair you want when an encoding problem shows up as mojibake in production. And the text reverser flips characters or words end to end, useful for puzzles, testing, and the occasional palindrome argument.

The generators do the creating. The lorem ipsum generator produces placeholder copy in whatever quantity you specify, so layouts can be judged before the real words exist.

The workflow this category fits is the last mile before publication or handoff: the moment a document stops being yours alone and has to survive another system's format expectations. Start with whichever tool names your chore; they are all single-purpose, and the case converter is the one most visitors meet first.

Scope, honestly: the Markdown converter handles common syntax well but implements neither every extension nor every dialect, so unusual nesting or vendor-specific features may need hand-fixing. Generated placeholder text is meant to be replaced. And the slug generator follows mainstream SEO conventions; it cannot know your CMS's private opinions. For the conventions behind the tools, Markdown for writers and the guide to URL slugs go deeper than any converter can.