Commands by Boojum (2)

  • Prepare B&W scans for clean looking, searchable PDF

    Scan pages in, clean them up in an image editor, save to individual files. Use this command to convert each page to PDF. Combine in Acrobat Professional, and use the built-in OCR with the "Searchable Image (Exact)" option. Gives excellent image quality and file size (avoids awful JPEG image recompression that Acrobat and other OCR systems tend to do.)


    3
    convert pagexxx.png -filter Cubic -resize 200% -threshold 50% -compress Group4 pagexxx.tiff; tiff2pdf -z -p letter -ro -x 1200 -y 1200 -o pagexxx.pdf pagexxx.tiff
    Boojum · 2009-02-05 20:14:06 23
  • Convert PDFLaTeX PDF to Illustrator-usable EPS

    Use this to turn a page with snippets of equations into vector paths that Adobe Illustrator can handle without choking on font embedding and substitution issues. Good for keeping fonts consistent when labeling charts and diagrams. Also good for embedding formulas into diagrams.


    0
    gs -dNOCACHE -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=epswrite -dEPSCrop -sOutputFile=out.eps in.pdf
    Boojum · 2009-02-05 20:06:40 15

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Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Let's make screen and ssh-agent friends
When you start screen as `ssh-agent screen`, agent will die after detatch. If you don't want to take care about files when stored agent's pid/socket/etc, you have to use this command.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Find the package that installed a command

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Get the size of all the directories in current directory (Sorted Human Readable)
This allows the output to be sorted from largest to smallest in human readable format.

Remove spaces from filenames - through a whole directory tree.
An example of zsh glob qualifiers.

Recursively grep for string and format output for vi(m)
This is a big time saver for me. I often grep source code and need to edit the findings. A single highlight of the mouse and middle mouse click (in gnome terminal) and I'm editing the exact line I just found. The color highlighting helps interpret the data.

Unite pdf files
pdfunite is a part of the poppler-utils. poppler-utils package is only 150KB. The alternative - pdftk package is 14MB! Install poppler-utils if you need simple pdf operation commands like unite, separate, info, text/html conversions

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