Miscellaneous things

I am Linux user !! More precisely, I’m working mainly under Ubuntu since my PhD thesis.

Usefull commands

• Convert a dvi to a pdf compliant with most of the IEEE conference’s format
  Those command lines permits to embed the fonts on the pdf file and to set a USletter format

  $dvips -t letter papier.dvi
  $ps2pdf14 -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dSubsetFonts=true papier.ps papier.pdf

• Start XFig with LatexFonts enabled

   $xfig -specialtext -latexfonts -startlatexFont default

• Delete folders with a given name (.svn for instance) recursively

   $find . -name ".svn" -type d -exec rm -rf {} \;

• Modifying PDF properties
  You can use the toolkit pdftk (available on repositories), a Swiss army knife for PDF…
  1) Get the properties

  $pdftk myfile.pdf dump_data output properties.txt

  2) Modify the file properties.txt

  3) Create the new pdf with those properties

  $pdftk myfile.pdf update_info properties.txt output myfilewithgoodprop.pdf

  pdftk provides other many usefull tools to merge pdf, extract some pages …etc (refer to http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/)

• Convert the format for images on the flyThe following bash script can be used:

  #!/bin/sh
  for i in *.pgm;do
  convert -quality 100 $i ${i%.pgm}.jpg;
  done

  This script requires ImageMagick package. It will convert all .pgm files into .jpg files (with a full quality), with the same name (51-69.pgm => 51-69.jpg)