Utility views

A utility view is a workbench built into the app rather than a tool: you bring a file to it, do one job and take the result away. The spreadsheet, the converter, the Colour Lab, the PDF extractor and Script audio are the five, and they all run on your device.

What a utility view is (and is not)

A tool is data - a manifest, a template, inputs that live in the URL - so it saves sessions, reopens from a link, renders from the CLI and exports through the shared pipeline. A utility view is none of those things. It is a page of the app with no manifest, no session store and no export panel: what you take away is a download, and when you leave, the file you dropped is gone.

That trade buys the things a tool cannot have. A view can use the shell's own controls (the Colour Lab is built on the app's multi-space colour picker), it can simply be a very tall page instead of a fixed canvas and it can hold a 200,000-row grid or a 400-page document that no render path would want. The cost is honest and easy to name before you start: no saved sessions, and nothing to keep offline per view, since they ship inside the app shell and are available whenever it is.

They live in the Utilities tab (#/u), alongside the on-device utility tools - Strip Hidden Data, Compress PDF, Convert Image, Convert Font, Redact, Screen Capture, Text Helper and the rest - because to anyone using them they are the same kind of thing: something you open from that grid. A view's tile can be starred like a tool's (Your favourites covers the strip that puts starred things on top), and each carries a details dialog. What a view's tile does not offer is keep offline or saved sessions, for the reasons above.

Verify & Inspect (#/verify) is the sixth member of the family and has pages of its own: Verify It Yourself and Security & Verification.

Spreadsheet - #/data

Open, read and lightly edit a spreadsheet with no Excel, no LibreOffice and no internet. Drop an .xlsx, .csv, .tsv or .json, or choose one; a multi-sheet workbook gets a tab bar and you can switch sheets without re-picking the file. Cells are editable in place, and Download as writes the grid as it stands - CSV, Excel, JSON or TSV.

The grid renders only the rows in view and recycles them as you scroll, so a very large file stays responsive: the viewer reads up to 200,000 rows, and a pathological workbook is bounded at two million cells by the reader itself. Where either bites, the banner above the grid says how much you are looking at.

It shows values. A formula arrives as its current computed result, and styles, merged cells, charts and every sheet but the one you downloaded do not survive the download. The banner above the grid states this before you edit anything, because the failure would otherwise be silent. Use it to read a file, fix some numbers and hand the data on - not to round-trip a formatted workbook.

Nothing is uploaded, and nothing is kept: the file lives in the page until you leave it.

Convert - #/convert

Drop a file, pick a target, get a download. Every conversion runs in the app with the engine's own codecs - no upload, no service.

Some edges to know. The prompt and the file chooser's filter name fonts, images and SVG only, so a spreadsheet or a .json has to be dropped onto the view rather than picked - it converts perfectly well once it arrives. A font swap and an SVG⇄SVGZ swap are exact byte work, so an embedded Content Credential and outlined text come through untouched; anything on the raster row is drawn to a canvas first, which is a re-encode. WOFF2 is recognised but has nothing to convert to, so it reports that rather than pretending. Vector-to-vector transcoding (SVG to EPS or DXF) is not offered at all, because the engine's vector writers walk a rendered canvas rather than arbitrary source SVG and would misconvert it. An .xlsx converts from its first sheet. And where a browser cannot encode a format it is asked for, the view says so instead of handing back a PNG wearing an .avif name.

Convert the view versus Convert Image the tool. The tool is the photo path: it decodes HEIC and HEIF with a bundled decoder, gives you a quality setting and a longest-edge resize, saves sessions and travels in a link like every other tool. The view is format plumbing with no settings - one click per target, whatever the browser can decode - and it reaches fonts, SVG and tabular data, which the tool does not. There is a Convert Font tool too, for the same swap as a saveable, linkable session.

Convert has no tile in the Utilities grid. Type "convert" into Search from any listing screen, or go to #/convert directly.

Colour Lab - #/lab

One colour, comprehensively. #/lab?c=<css colour> opens the report on any CSS colour, and the address tracks what you pick, so a link reproduces the page you are looking at.

The report runs in five steps: set a colour (the app's tabbed multi-space picker, or your brand's own swatches), plotted on a colour space (four charts, governed by a comparison target you choose), every notation (the same colour written for each space, copyable, with a clamped mark where a space is too narrow to hold it), tones and blends (a perceptually even ramp through the colour, and a blend across to a second one at a step count you set) and displayable range and readability (the gamut verdict, then the contrast scores - APCA first because it models polarity, WCAG second because people still have to report it, with a foldable grid of every brand colour against every other and a colour-vision simulation over it).

The colour is never collapsed to sRGB on the way in. color(display-p3 1 0 0) is described at its real chroma and its real gamut rather than flattened to #ff0000 and then declared safe, and every swatch is painted from the value you authored, so a wide-gamut display shows the real thing.

Your own ICC profiles. The comparison target is sRGB, Display-P3 or Rec.2020 or a press profile you load yourself. A stored profile rides the same rail as an uploaded font - it is a user asset, so the storage meter counts it, a data export carries the bytes and Clear all my data removes it - and its id is derived from the file's own content, so a &limit=icc:… link matches the same profile on someone else's device rather than depending on a filename. Two files are refused rather than stored: one the parser cannot read, and one no rendering intent can be asked a gamut question of. This is also where you load the CMYK profile a PDF/X-4 export has to embed - see URL Mode.

A This screen panel at the foot reports the display the charts are being judged against, read live and stored nowhere.

There is no export here. The page is the document: no canvas, no render, no CLI equivalent - copy the notations you need, or share the link.

Unpack - #/unpack

A design file is a container, and most software treats it as one opaque thing. This view opens it: the words, the vector marks, the images, the fonts, the colours and the attachments, each viewable and downloadable. Drop a PDF or Illustrator file, an SVG, an InDesign .idml, a Penpot .penpot, a Figma .fig, a PowerPoint .pptx or a Photoshop/GIMP .psd/.xcf. Nothing is uploaded. (The older #/pdf link still works.)

Each format gives up what it honestly holds. A PDF and a slide deck carry their glyphs, so the words come out; an SVG or .idml names its fonts rather than embedding the files, so those come back as names-only rows you cannot download; a Penpot or Photoshop file embeds its images, so those travel as real bytes, while an InDesign document only links its images, so their pixels stay where they live and are counted, not fetched. A layered PSD/XCF gives every layer as its own named PNG; its text was flattened to pixels by the reader, so it has no words to extract here (which is not the same as the file having none).

The Text pass rebuilds each page in reading order with the page's own vector picture beside it, noting how many columns it was read as and how many rotated runs were left out, so you can judge the reconstruction. Take it away with Copy all, Download .md or Download .txt or copy one page at a time. For an SVG the text is its <text> runs in document order; an SVG whose type was outlined to paths honestly yields nothing, the same answer a PDF gives when its text was converted to curves.

There is no OCR. A born-digital PDF already contains its glyphs and their positions, which is why the extraction works offline at all - but a scanned page holds a picture of text and nothing else, and it is reported as exactly that, page by page. A document where every page is a scan gets that as a banner at the top rather than a footnote, because the next thing you need is a different tool.

The tabs sit in a raised strip pinned to the top of the report, so as you scroll the pages you keep seeing that your images, fonts and colours came out too. Each tab appears only when a pass found something, so the strip describes your document rather than what a container could theoretically hold: Palette (the distinct colours it paints with, each with a copy button), Logos (vector marks, downloadable as SVG and usually the most useful thing in a guidelines file, since they stay sharp at any size), Images (embedded rasters - undecodable or linked-from-elsewhere ones are counted rather than hidden, and a linked image's pixels are never fetched), Fonts (each with its own embedding caveats stated plainly - a subset is called a subset, a names-only face carries no bytes and "no embedding restriction" is not called a licence) and Attachments.

One check runs before any of it: text painted underneath an opaque shape is reported at the top of the report, with the hidden words shown. A black bar that does not actually remove the words underneath is worth seeing rather than trusting.

Three hand-offs go straight into the brand: a font row installs its face, a mark goes to the Brand Studio's Logos room and the bar sends the whole scan to the studio. None of them re-scans the document - each is built from what the passes already extracted.

Limits, stated: 400 pages and 120 MB, beyond which it reads what it can and says the rest is too long, and a single mark over 4 MB is not sent to the studio (download the SVG instead).

Script audio - #/script

A writing surface over on-device speech. Write or paste a script - markdown is fine, only the words are read, so code blocks and images drop out and links keep their text - pick a voice, audition it, choose a speed and press Generate speech (or Ctrl/Cmd-Enter). Under the sheet sit the two numbers a narrator wants: how many words, and roughly how long they take to listen to, always labelled as an estimate.

The first run downloads the voice model once, with its size stated before you commit. After that it runs on the device, and the script itself is never uploaded. A script past about five thousand characters gets a warning, not a wall.

Save to your uploads writes the clip as a WAV in your own asset library, with the voice, speed and per-word timings kept on the record - which is what a captioning surface later reads. It is marked as AI-generated and carries that badge wherever assets are shown, and the file itself is signed: a Content Credential is embedded in the WAV bytes, so the clip says what made it wherever it travels. See Generated once, rendered the same for why generated audio is declared this way.

Where a device or browser has no speech support, the view says so in a sentence rather than showing a form that cannot work, and the Utilities grid does not draw the card at all.

Related: Using Lolly for the tools and the gallery these sit beside. Your favourites for starring a utility tile. Search for reaching any of them by name from anywhere. Exporting & Formats for what the tools themselves can write.