Kim Pyeong Gwon

Document platform PoC series — the predecessors of localization.md

Building a separate translator, editor, and checker for every format multiplies cost by the number of formats. I tested the hypothesis that handling every document through one common representation lets a single feature work across all formats — rebuilding it six times with a different architecture each time.

  • Hypothesis: convert PDF, PPTX, DOCX, and EPUB into a page-based common JSON (Unified Layout JSON); the web layer only reads, edits, and saves that JSON, and original formats are touched only at import and export.
  • Validation path: a UI-only PoC to check the user flow → a format adapter/exporter structure → an architecture splitting translation, conversion, viewer, and editor into separate services.
  • Design decisions it produced: separate format engines from the platform and make the common JSON the single source of truth; normalize reflowing documents such as DOCX and EPUB into page-fixed snapshots for review.
  • Extension: on the same representation, distinguish 'conversion' (keep the original) from 'generation' (use the original as source material — a PDF report into a slide deck, a manual into a training EPUB, tables into Excel).
  • Outcome: these decisions became the architecture of localization.md.

See also