In-app overview of supported formats and conversions

There's no way to see inside the app which formats Consul supports or what a given file can be converted into. The website has a full overview; a smaller version of it in the app itself would help.

CLI Mode

Allow Consul to be run directly from the Terminal as an universal file converter for the CLI.

Hot Folders

Allow creating “hot folders” that would automatically convert files dropped inside to a specific format, without any manual action required. For example, create a ~/ToJPEG folder and configure that to automatically convert any files dropped inside to JPEG files (if possible).

SVG <> DWG <> DXF

I’d like to be able to convert vector (drawing) files. This should be implementable, as there are many online converters that do this. I use this to go from Adobe Illustrator drawings to CAD/CAM software for things like CNC machining. Illustrator exports .AI or .SVG, but CAD software commonly only imports .DWG or .DXF. Perhaps it’s possible to convert .AI directly as well (and there are many more vector file formats I believe, but I’m not an expert on that field).

AutoCad Change of Years

Different programs support certain years for autocad. For example, I have a program that only 2007 works. I can create a new autocad in 2025 then I have to save it as a 2007 for it work. It would be cool to have consul do this.

Autocad to PDF

Problem: Current way to get a pdf from an autocad is frustrating. It takes a lot of work to just get the image to come out nicely and not a mini-version of it, or a zoomed in version. Ability to create PDFs from dwgs would be amazing.

Error message when downloading large PDFs - but still works

Hi, when I download a large PDF into my Downloads folder (which Consul is monitoring), Consul triggers this “error”: Permission Required - Cannot read file format Consul needs Full Disk Access to detect the format of "PFT.pdf". This occurs when downloading starts. At no point do I trigger Consul, nor plan to use it on this particular file. The file downloads fine anyway.

More codecs for video conversions?

Hi. I have an older Samsung TV which doesn’t support modern video formats (containers) like MKV. It does eat AVI though. I’ve used a script with FFmpeg to convert MKV to AVI until I bought Consul today. But the only coded offered is VP9 which is not supported by my TV… Any chance of adding more codecs (mpeg, h264, h265) to the list of available codecs? Thanks!

Alternative OCR Engine for unsupported languages (e.g. Greek)

As per https://consul.featurebase.app/p/language-selection-for-ocr, the default macOS OCR engine Consul currently uses does not support several languages such as Greek. Consul should therefore ship a second OCR engine, e.g. Tesseract, as an alternative to the system engine for such languages.

Text-to-Speech

Allow converting text files and documents to audio, automatically narrating their content.

Resizing images bey adding a suffix

Hi, it would be cool if I could resize an image by adding _200px or something like that as a suffix to its file name. (I think githubs md image syntax or something similar would be handy.)

Buttons / Drag and drop to sort created rules

Hi. Can you please add the possibility to either drag and drop or up / down buttons to sort the existing rules? Atm they appear in the order of creation time (and that’s not really helpful if you have a lot of different rules for different types of conversions). Thanks!

Duplicate a file before converting (preserving original)

In addition to the backup/undo system, it would also make sense for some workflows to intentionally keep the original file next to the converted file (e.g. to preserve an editable version with DOCX → PDF conversions).

MP3 to M4B

This is a great app! Any chance to get an MP# to M4B Converter? Thanks!

Excel Converter

I’d like Consul to also convert Excel files (xls, xlsx) to other spreadsheet formats like CSV or Numbers

Rotating images

It would be good if I have a file and add some parameters to the extension the Consul app will do some transformations and rename the file back. For example adding to “.JPG” “-90” the Consul app will rotate the image CCW 90 degrees and rename JPG-90 to JPG back. JPG+180 rotate CW 180 degrees. JPG+H - horizontal flip. And so on.

Shrinking size of PDF and Images

Do you know such useful application like clop? https://lowtechguys.com/clop/ Can you implement similar functionality in your application? For example, if I want to shrink PDF file I rename it to "PDF-" and the Consul app compress it and rename it to "PDF" again. The same is with JPG. We rename it to "JPG-" and your app compress it and rename it to "JPG" again.

Powerpoint to PDF (PPTX <> PDF)

Show estimated file size and a settings summary in the confirmation popup

The confirmation popup hides conversion settings behind a collapsed section, so it's easy to miss that they exist. Show a short summary even when collapsed, e.g. "Quality 85 · Strip metadata · ~2.1 MB", including an estimate of the resulting file size.

Lower default image quality to reduce output file sizes

Consul currently defaults to quality 100 for most image conversions, which produces unnecessarily large files (a 10 MB HEIC can turn into a JPEG of similar size or even bigger). Most tools default to 80–90. Lower the default so converted files come out at a reasonable size without touching any settings.

Language Selection for OCR

It would be helpful to tell the application wich language (alphabet) to expect when OCRing a picture. I have a geek text but the system detect latin letter.

Additional Languages / Localization

Localize the app’s user interface into more languages, like German, Spanish, French, and so on