Format advice written from actual production work — interior design drawings, 3D pipelines, and documents that need to be sent in the next ten minutes.
These guides exist because each one is a problem I hit repeatedly in my own work as a creative director across theme park, video, and 3D projects — and because the advice available online tended to be either a specification dump or an ad for software. They're written to answer the question you actually have when you're stuck, including the parts where the honest answer is "this won't work, do something else instead."
Why ChatGPT and Claude read a Word doc, PDF, PowerPoint or Excel file far better as Markdown — the right converter for each format, and the token-saving “Plain text for AI” mode.
AI · Markdown · DOCX/PDF/PPTX/XLSX
Why some PDF drawings convert cleanly to CAD and others can't be converted at all, how to tell which you have in ten seconds, what's lost along the way, and how to fix the scale afterwards.
Interior design · architecture · CAD
What each 3D format actually carries, why textures vanish between tools, the SketchUp .skp problem and its workaround, and how to handle assets from Sketchfab and AI 3D generators.
3D pipelines · game engines · SketchUp
Why PDFs get large, which compression level fits which document, what you permanently lose, how to hit a hard email limit, and how to avoid the problem at export time.
Portfolios · decks · scans
Two AutoCAD formats that look interchangeable and aren't — what each is for, why DXF exists, when a shared "CAD file" is really a PDF, and how to dodge the classic scale and exploded-block traps.
CAD · AutoCAD · interchange
A step-by-step pipeline for moving a SketchUp model into a game engine without it arriving black, inside-out, or the wrong size — export format, normals, scale, polygon budget, and materials.
Game engines · Unreal · Unity
Why Markdown beats raw files for AI assistants, how to cut your token count, when to split a long document into chunks, and how to do it all without uploading confidential files.
AI · Markdown · tokens
What each image format is actually good at, the lossy-versus-lossless idea that explains the trade-offs, where AVIF, GIF and HEIC fit, and a ten-second guide to picking the smallest format that still looks right.
Images · web · formats
What the HEIC format is, why iPhones default to it, why other people can't open it, and the two ways to get plain JPGs — including converting the photos you already have without uploading them.
iPhone · HEIC · JPG
The real attachment limits, why files inflate by a third in transit, and how to shrink a PDF, photo or video enough to send — with the honest fallback for when a file simply won't fit.
Email · compression · attachments
The newest image format worth knowing — how it beats JPG and WebP on size, where support still falls short, and when it's actually worth using (with a fallback).
Images · AVIF · web
Why MP4 plays everywhere and WebM is built for the web, the codecs inside each, and the one-line rule for picking the right video format for the job.
Video · MP4 · WebM
Why SVG stays sharp at any size and PNG goes everywhere, when to use each, how to pick an export resolution, and why tracing a PNG back to SVG rarely works.
Vector · logos · icons
What combining, splitting, reordering and rotating PDF pages each do — and why the sensitive documents you most need to reorganise shouldn't be uploaded to do it.
PDF · pages · privacy
Getting a clean MP3 out of a video: extraction vs. conversion, which format to pick (MP3 / M4A / WAV), sensible length limits, and why doing it locally keeps a private recording private.
Audio · MP3 · video
Three ways to turn a video into text — the transcript panel, a caption file, or speech-to-text — why "paste a link" tools quietly need a server, and how to clean the result for AI.
YouTube · transcript · AI
How OCR works, how to get an accurate result from a scan or photo, what it can't do (handwriting), why scanned PDFs need it, and how to extract text without uploading the file.
OCR · scans · text