Shiva: A New Project, an Alternative to Apache Tika and Pandoc

I began the journey of the Shiva project with the first commit in March 2024, aiming to create a versatile tool written in Rust for document parsing and conversion. Over the months, it has grown significantly, expanding support for a wide range of file formats including HTML, Markdown, plain text, PDF, JSON, CSV, RTF, DOCX, XML, XLS, XLSX, ODS, and Typst. Shiva is an open-source project, and its repository can be found at github.com/igumnoff/shiva.

The goal with Shiva is to provide an alternative to established tools like Apache Tika, written in Java, and Pandoc, developed in Haskell. While these tools have long been staples for developers working with documents, Shiva aims to offer a simple and efficient alternative that can handle the growing diversity and complexity of digital documents. The project is evolving quickly, and there is still a lot of work to do, but we are excited about the progress so far.

A huge thank you to all the contributors who helped add support for so many formats. Your efforts have been invaluable.

Feel free to check out the repository and contribute or provide feedback. The community is open to ideas and collaboration to push the boundaries of what Shiva can achieve.