insightmedia » Usefull stuff

Using the right tools at the right time

dan.hawk — Fri, 27 May 2011 07:36:56 +0000

Reading my daily dose of feeds on GReader, i came across on an older post from Bruno Lowagie’s blog (if iText rings any bells) explaining why software needs to be kept simple and oriented to its designed role and not doing a ton of things that don’t have anything to do with the initial target. I don’t know why but the story amuzes me everytime i read it. here it is:

Don’t eat soup with a fork

[rb] Fonts and their open source alternatives

dan.hawk — Wed, 11 May 2011 19:32:15 +0000

Swiss 921 – Antone by Vernon Adams [http://www.google.com/webfonts/preview#font-family=Anton]

* to be updated *

Getting content from a signed pdf document

dan.hawk — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 07:49:25 +0000

While most of the time the person that adds a signature for the document, disabling the editing of that document has good reasons for doing so, you sometimes might need to get that content to make some changes. For that you’ll need Acrobat Professional and OSX (tested on 10.4 … might work on 10.5 too):

First step: Open you pdf document with Preview and select the “Select tool” and select the part of the document that you need to edit and copy it.

Second step: Create a new document, hit paste and save it.
Note: at this point the document is editable but the fonts might come as garbage. However you can use the next steps to overcome that.

The next steps are only for flattening/outlining fonts.

Third step: Open the newly created document with Acrobat Professional and add a background to the document from Document -> Background – > Add and set the Opacity to 0(this is needed most of the time if you want to flatten the document).

Fourth step: Flatten the document from Advanced -> Print Production -> Flattener preview (check Convert all text to outlines if you want the fonts to be outlined) and save the document.

This should be it … now you should have an unlocked and working file.

Did you ever regret sending an email after a night out?

dan.hawk — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 16:16:50 +0000

Well i surely did … unfortunatelly, this little plugin for Gmail was not there when I needed it the most …
Just enable Mail Goggles in the Labs page of your Gmail options, and you’ll find youself infront of a math problem whenever you want to send an email. We all know how difficult math is after a night out ) You can even tune the plugin in the General tab of the options panel after you enable it.

Enjoy