Appendin bot

Inspiration

As a student in university I regularly work with different types of documents and sometimes it is not easy. Images inside Word files with .doc and docx extensions often look different in third-party apps, such as google docs. Pdf files always look the same on any device but composing and saving pdf is always a pain. I wanted to create simple and convenient app that was going to solve this problem. And I thought it could be useful for those who run their own business too! For example you can upload contract or bills photos and bot will do the rest of the job. The bot name comes from word "append", because the main idea was to append next image to previous.

What it does

Appendin bot is very simple, yet powerful app that converts images you send to a single pdf file. And it is blazing fast, give it a try!

How I built it

As always, I started with googling and researching. I needed powerful and lightweight library that can deal with images and pdf. And found one called "pdfkit". Its main function is to generate pdf files right inside node.js and it works like a swiss watch. However it wasn't as easy as copy and paste, you will need to write some code and configure it to make it work.

Challenges I ran into

I was stuck few times while building Appendin Bot. At first I saw example app on facebook's github, but it was using deprecated request library. So I decided to go deep and used node fetch library to use Facebook send API. Send API documentation was really hard for me to understand few times, however I managed to do what I needed.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am really proud of progress I made during this challenge because there were few nights without sleep, many hours of coding and tons of errors and bugs fixed coding. I think the main accomplishment I did is I have read enormous amount of documentations and I have googled ridiculous amount of questions. I became obsessed with this bot and I made it work!

What I learned

Building Facebook messenger bot is totally new experience for me and it was really entertaining. I think I will continue working on Appendin bot and my future projects using messenger.

What's next for Appendin bot

The next major update for Appendin Bot is OCR text recognition, so you can have plain text from images that you send

Built With

• body-parser
• express.js
• fs
• ngrok
• node-fetch
• node.js
• pdfkit