More about Reader and PDFs

Okay, thanks to Jeff who commented on my previous post I finally got the SD card working on Linux. If you ever have problems, enable CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN in the kernel. Tomorrow I’ll add a warning to the libprs500 ebuild if it’s unset.

Tonight I didn’t have much time, but I’ve seen that a 9 x 12 cm page is just the right setting for the reader. In LaTeX this produces a page that is perfect for reading on the Reader.

Unfortunately texinfo is not as easy as LaTeX, even if I set the size of the page, it only reduces the size of the text inside it and I can’t find how to reduce the actual page size in the PDF. While this is enough to use the zoom function of the Reader, you’ll have to repeat it for every page, and it gets boring. I’d very much like to crop the pdf file.

Unfortunately the only tool I found that can crop PDF files is ImageMagick’s convert. But convert acts on images, and that causes two problems: first it takes up a huge amount of memory (gs converts a 15MB PDF file into a 400MB PGM file, and back again); second it creates an image-only PDF file that, well, let’s just say that a 90×120 pixels (okay I got the wrong unit, it happens!) file is big 24MB, and I remember you I started from 15MB.

I was suggested by Pino (oKular developer) to try pdftk, but as far as I can see from the documentation available online, it does not allow me to crop the pages. I’ve now found an interesting script that would add cropping data to Postscript files; if ghostscript supports those, it would then allow me to convert the ps back to a cropped PDF. Tomorrow I’ll have to try.

And yes, tomorrow I ll see to provide a few more photos, of a book showing up on the Reader, both a standard PDF and an ad-hoc generated copy of “The Not So Short Guide to LaTeX2e” most likely.

On a totally different note, I was watching movie trailers on my Apple TV now and… yet another movie that makes computer capable of anything right now, “Untraceable”. And people complain that CSI is unrealistic.