Annotate or write on top of a pdf file

Posted by & filed under Linux.

Sometimes I need to annotate a pdf file, either to take notes or to fill it out as a form since I have ugly handwriting; for the latter, I’m referring to the case where the pdf file does not have form fields you can type in with Adobe Reader. This post describes some programs for… Read more »

extracting pages in a pdf file

Posted by & filed under LaTeX.

This post shows how one can use the pdftk command The PDF Toolkit to extract pages from a pdf file: pdftk myDocument.pdf cat 1-9 15 17-19 26-end output removedPages.pdf

Embed all fonts in a pdf file

Posted by & filed under LaTeX.

I recently had to embed all fonts in a pdf file for electronic submission of my dissertation. Embedding of fonts is usually required for publishing academic articles as well. I generate my pdf files mainly with LaTeX using the pdflatex command. This post shows how one can embed fonts generated by the tex file; this… Read more »

emacs keybindings in xpdf and xdvi

Posted by & filed under Emacs.

I’ve been using xpdf and xdvi for reading documents I’ve downloaded or my LaTeX-generated documents on the laptop more and more these days due to their speed. The one thing I require (desire) in all programs I use on a day to day basis, especially when I have to navigate the file, is to have… Read more »

Foxit Phantom, an Adobe Acrobat alternative, for Linux via WINE

Posted by & filed under Linux.

There are plenty of open source tools on Linux that can assist with pdf files. However, sometimes you just have to do something that requires Adobe Acrobat (e.g., editing pdf files). You can’t install Adobe Acrobat directly on Linux; I currently use Adobe Acrobat via a Windows virtual machine via VirtualBox. This post lists some… Read more »

Convert raster image to vector image

Posted by & filed under Linux.

I wanted to convert some raster images (bmp, png, etc.) to vector images (svg, pdf, eps) so that they can be rescaled easily. I found Vector Magic, which used to be free from Stanford University but now cost a grip; however, they do allow some free conversions. This post let me know that Potrace is… Read more »

Convert eps to pdf with the correct page size or boundaries

Posted by & filed under Linux.

ps2pdf by itself always converted the ps file to pdf onto a different sized paper. I finally discovered how to get the right paper size via this post. Here is my eps2pdf.sh script: #! /bin/bash ## look in comments ## http://opendevice.blogspot.com/2007/05/eps-to-pdf-how-to-avoid-clipping.html for file in “$@” do ps2pdf -dEPSCrop “$file” done

wget to mass download files

Posted by & filed under Linux.

Sometimes I want to download all files on a page. The flashgot plugin works, but it involves clicking which can be a pain if you have a lot of pages to download. Recently I’ve been wanting to download pdf’s off a page. Found out that I can do so with wget on the command line:… Read more »