Articles about howto

1. Adding an overlay to each page of a pdf file

   We can use PostScript’s Endpage procedure to e.g. add a signature to each page of a PDF file, using only ghostscript.

2. Transplanting noscript settings and bookmarks to another machine

   After upgrading a laptop to 12-CURRENT, I had problems with firefox 57 choking on some javascript in an extension. So I renamed my ~/.mozilla directory and let firefox create a new one. That solved the problem. But with that I lost my noscript settings and my bookmarks.

3. Compiling asymptote for TeXLive on FreeBSD

   As of TeXLive 2015 there is no TeXLive binary for FreeBSD included anymore. So I’m building my own, using …

4. Removing big files from git history

   By accident I checked 60-odd full-size photographs into the git history of my website. I shrunk them in a next commit, but the history was still there leading to a bloated .git directory. This took a lot of time when making backups. This documents how I cleaned up this mess.

5. PDF tricks

   This article contains several useful tricks for manipulating PDF files.

   The focus of this article is on Open Source and Free software, that are available for UNIX-like operating systems. These tools are made for use on the command-line of a shell.

6. Adding text or graphics to a PDF file

   Using Acrobat Reader’s ability to add text et cetera has proven unreliable for me. On multiple occasions I have lost all the text added to a PDF file. When your filling in 20-plus pages worth of permit forms this is a huge waste of time and extremely annoying.

   So I set out to find another way using the free and open-source tools I have available.

7. Installing asymptote 2.38 in TeXLive 2016

   Since the previous article [1] I’ve updated TexLive to 2016. This comes with asymptote 2.38, but not with …

8. Reading xlsx files with Python

   This article is a write-up of what I learned trying to extract information from ms-office xlsx files using Python.

9. Finding your own files, fast

   Inspired by this blog post by Julia Evans, I set up a quick way to find files in my home directory. This howto is based on FreeBSD, but should work (with some tweaking maybe) on Linux and OS-X as well.

10. Adding scale markers to a scanned image

    in a previous article we saw how a desktop scanner can be used for macro photography. Often it would be handy to include a visual reference of the scale of such pictures. In this howto I’m using asymptote to add accurate scales next to the picture.