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Filer Usecase

Every New Draft, Already a PDF

A Filer folder agent notices a new document, converts it to PDF on its own, and leaves a clean, shareable file sitting right next to the original.

  • File event
  • Chat
  • Right-click

What you get

Notes, drafts, and write-ups end up in whatever format was fastest to write in — Markdown, HTML, a Word document. Sharing one outside the team means opening it, exporting it to PDF by hand, and doing that again every time the draft changes.

Point a Filer folder at where those drafts land instead. Its agent watches the folder, and when a document shows up, it converts it to PDF on its own — no office suite, no export dialog, no reminder to do it before sending the file on.

How to do it

Screenshots below are from an actual run against a live Filer instance, using a placeholder notes file in place of a real document.

Needs: the document-converter plugin, installed from Connect.

What it needs

  • A Filer folder with a trust level that allows file-triggered runs to write a new file
  • The document-converter plugin, installed from Connect (docx, Markdown, HTML, and plain text in; PDF, HTML, Markdown, or plain text out)
  • Nothing else — no inference endpoint is needed for the conversion itself, only for the chat/trigger paths that call it through a model

  1. A folder with one draft, no PDF yet

    A one-line instruction on the folder is all it takes — no workflow builder, no separate automation tool to configure:

    Instruction

    When a new Markdown (.md) file is added to this folder, convert it to PDF using the convert_document tool. Set targetFormat to "pdf" and outputPath to the same filename with a .pdf extension, in this same folder.

  2. Ask for the conversion — or let the trigger do it

    The instruction above fires this same call the moment a new .md file lands, with no one asking. For this run it was triggered from chat instead, asking the agent to convert weekly-notes.md — same tool, same result, just a different way to start it.

    What the agent actually reported back
    "Successfully converted! The weekly-notes.md file has been transformed into PDF format and saved as `weekly-notes.pdf` in your working directory (`C:/Demo/document-converter`)."

  3. A finished PDF, sitting next to the original

    No export dialog, no office suite — the converted file just shows up alongside the source, ready to share.

Verified

This isn't a mockup — the screenshots above are from one real run: the request really reached the agent, the agent really called the conversion tool, and the PDF sitting next to the original is really a valid, openable PDF — confirmed by checking the folder afterward, not just the agent's own report. The conversion itself runs through deterministic code, not a language model guessing at formatting — what's being verified here is that the request, the tool call, and the file write all connect end to end, on any of the three entry paths above.

Where else this applies

The mechanism generalizes to any folder where documents arrive in a working format but need to leave in a shareable one:

  • Meeting notes folder — every recap written in Markdown becomes a PDF ready to send, without anyone opening an editor's export menu.
  • Policy or spec drafts — a document written or exported as HTML gets a signature-ready PDF the moment it's finalized.
  • Mixed Word-doc archive — normalize a folder of old .docx files down to plain text or Markdown for search or migration, one file at a time.
  • Send the PDF on, automatically — add the folder's Email, Notion, or Telegram plugin and have the agent share the freshly-converted PDF the same moment it finishes writing it, instead of stopping at the file.

Other ways in

Right-click
Chat
Other automation triggers
The walkthrough above shows the chat path, but the folder's own instruction converts new drafts on its own the moment a .md file lands — no one has to ask. There's a third way too: right-click any .docx, .md, .html, or .txt file and choose Convert to... to pick a target format on the spot. All three paths — trigger, chat, right-click — call the same underlying tool.
Other integrations
Not shown in this walkthrough.
See all usecases

Try it in your own folder

Download Filer