Though I’ve long known of the Windows Alt- and Mac Option-key codes for producing extended characters, I’ve only recently discovered a couple different shortcuts that allow the same thing under Linux.

A discussion at Daily Writing Tips about em-dashes, specifically regarding when to use them, spun in the direction of how to produce em-dash characters.

The immediate and obvious suggestion was to rely on word processors’ automatic character replacement—which generally involves swapping out two minus signs for “—” as-you-type. It was also pointed out, however, that there are specific key sequences you can use within different OSes to produce these characters without benefit of a word processor.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I first switched to Linux, I also attempted to switch to Gimp—which is generally considered to be Linux’s Photoshop. My experience with Gimp, especially versions before 2.5, was not great, and I switched back to Photoshop pretty quickly.

One of my freelance clients publishes a newsletter every month, and I convert the PDF into JPG images to use on the site as a sort of low-fi online version. I discovered pretty quickly that Gimp’s conversion routines did a terrible job. Eventually, I found a solution using ImageMagick, which I had used previously in my bipolar gallery scripts.

Converting images is super easy with ImageMagick’s convert command, and as it turns out, convert can also handle PDF files.

Here’s the commandline I use:

convert -density 300 -size 4100 sourcefile.pdf -quality 100 outputfiles.jpg

Basically, this converts each page of the pdf into a 300ppi JPG with a maximum dimension of 4100 pixels and a JPG quality setting of 100% (or no compression). Each page is saved as an individual JPG named outputfilesXX.jpg (where XX represents the page number, starting at 00).

This gives me much higher-quality starting images than Gimp provided, which I can then resize as needed.

convert has a huge array of features beyond this simple example, and is worth a look if you need to do image manipulation from a script, or batch operations on images from the commandline.

I’m going to kick off the Linux Toolbox with a relatively simple one.

Command: alias
Purpose: create command-line shortcuts
Benefit: save time and effort by simplifying complicated, commonly-executed commands.

If you spend any time at the Linux command-line, chances are that you are going to type the same commands repeatedly. Or, there may be long or complex commands that you enter only rarely, but you don’t want to have to look up every time you need them.

Alias allows you create temporary command shortcuts within the current terminal session.

Read the rest of this entry »