S.R. Shohan

I build software for hospitals and diagnostic laboratories — hospital information systems, and the integrations that connect laboratory analyzers to the systems that store their results. Most of that work is in C# and .NET, with React on the front end and PostgreSQL or Oracle underneath.

Toolerax is mine: I designed, built and now maintain all 169 tools and write all 148 guides on the site myself.

Why I built Toolerax

The work above produces a steady stream of awkward files. Scanned consent forms arrive as multi-page TIFFs. Analyzer manuals come as anything but PDF. Reports need converting before anyone can email them. For years I did what everyone does — searched for a converter, found a site that wanted an upload, an account and a subscription, and got back a file with a watermark on it.

What bothered me most was the uploading. Resizing an image or merging two PDFs does not require sending patient paperwork to somebody else’s server; browsers have been able to do that work locally for years. So I started building the tools the way I thought they should work, and put them online free.

How the tools actually work

Most of them run entirely in your browser— the file is opened by the page, processed on your own machine and never transmitted anywhere. Those are marked as such, and you can verify it: open your browser’s network tab and watch nothing leave.

A minority genuinely cannot work that way. Decoding a HEIC photo, rendering a Word document or running OCR needs real document and imaging engines that do not exist in a browser. Those tools run on a server I administer myself, over HTTPS, and the file is deleted the moment the result is sent back. Every one of those pages says so plainly rather than burying it — you should know which kind of tool you are using before you upload anything.

How I write the guides

Each guide is written next to the tool it documents, and checked against what the tool actually does rather than what it is supposed to do. When a tool has a limitation, the guide says so — that converting a multi-page TIFF to JPG gives you only the first page, or that an SVG with a missing font will come back with substituted lettering. A guide that hides the caveat just wastes the reader’s time twice.

I update articles when the underlying tool changes, and I write about formats and problems I have actually dealt with. There is no content team here and nothing is published to hit a quota.

Elsewhere

You can find my code on GitHub, and some of Toolerax’s own libraries are open-sourced at github.com/toolerax. If something on the site is wrong, slow or missing, tell me on the contact page — feedback from people using the tools is how most of them got better.