I like the PDF file format for so many reasons – free writer under linux is one of them, usually it’s just configured out of the box – openoffice does a nice export to PDF too. Of course, PDF is accessible on all platforms with free viewers…. there are some pdf writers for windows that are free, among them…. PDF Creator and cutepdf also distributes a free pdf writer. Printing to the virtual pdf printer makes archiving web pages fairly easily done as well.
Tag: PDF
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PDF printing in Ubuntu
One of the things I have a tendency to do is save licence key – web confirmation pages to a pdf by printing. It gives a good capture of the document and saves me from actually having another paper to find a place to file. But, ubuntu (dapper) doesn’t seem to be setup for pdf printing by default. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to set up…. install cups-pdf (apt-get install cups-pdf), navigate to System -> Administration -> Printing and doubleclick to add a new printer… no pdf printer is detected… there must be work to do (click cancel). As root (“sudo nautilus”) navigate to Filesystem, then /usr/lib/cups/backend – right click cups-pdf and select properties and check “set user id”. Now, try to add a printer again and you should see PDF Printer, add it with the Generic, Postscript Color Printer (Rev 3b) driver, name it PDF-printer or something like that and now you should have PDF’s dropped into a folder in your home directory named PDF.
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Converting pdf to tif (tiff) images
One of the things I was looking into this morning was the possiblity of converting a pdf into a tiff image. Many character recognition programs (and some music recognition software) uses tiff as one of the formats that it can recognize from. I have a number of things in PDF format that I wanted to test out by converting to tif. There MUST be a way….. yes there is (several I suppose).. In linux though the answer is ghostscript.
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Spyware news and musings
It’s funny, in the last couple days 180solutions had a blog post that was somewhat… what’s the term I’m looking for ? well they were quite defensive and concerned about “anti-spyware zealots” about “Scanning companies” and trying to work with them to explain their business model. Of course, legal action is not something they want to pursue, but if the business talks with the scanning companies fail, well it’s an option. Some months ago they claimed to be trying to clean up their act. Supposedly they were to crack down on “affiliates” using unscrupulous means to spread their ad content.
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Ever want to publish a book?
This is a WOW idea. This article at the Financial Mirror, talks about Bob Young, the founder of Red Hat Linux, and his latest venture. The venture is called Lulu and if you’ll pardon me it’s a “Lulu” of an idea. Basically, if you have a book you would like to get published you can do so through this site and sell individual copies. Yes, traditionally you have to get a book deal and they do a printing of thousands of copies (if they think your book will sell.) This is book publishing for the “on demand” mindset.
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