There are many ways to convert documents on Ubuntu, but few are as quick or as easy to use as Morphosis.
Morphosis is a new desktop app written in Python and GTK4/libadwaita, powered by Pandoc, a command-line document converter tool for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Pandoc is a powerful and efficient tool, but not everyone is comfortable with the command line. And even those who are may not want to swot up on the various arguments and flags needed to be specified in order to convert files to a specific format.
Enter Morphosis, which wraps the power of Pandoc in a super-simple GUI.
With Morphosis, you can convert any text document mentioned on the Pandoc ‘input’ list into the following formats:
- Markdown
- reStructuredText
- LaTeX
- HTML
- Microsoft Word (
.docx) - OpenOffice/LibreOffice (
.odt) - Rich Text Format (
.rtf) - EPUB
When converting a .docx, PDF, or HTML, you can specify the font to use. This helps ensure things look nice and legible on other side. Also, images within text documents are rendered in the output document, which is great.
However, one thing Morphosis (or rather Pandoc) can’t do is convert a PDF to another format. It only supports converting a supported text document to PDF. There are tools which can convert a PDF to DOCX, RTF, etc., but this is not one of them.
But if this tool sounds handy, give it a try.
Anyone who regularly works with or is asked to ‘export’ to more commonly used formats for work or study should at least keep this app in mind for future needs as it’s bound to come in handy.
You can find source code for Morphosis on Gitlab, where is where you’ll also want to file any issues you encounter while using it, file feature requests and suggestions, or muck in and contribute code to help improve the app for you and everyone else.
Otherwise, crack on and install Morphosis from Flathub.