Rob's Unix Tip of the Day File

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A collection of Linux and LaTeX related tricks and hacks that I've found useful over the years. Appologies for the fact that it's in plain text, and the entries are completely uncategorised. The content below originates from a text file in my home directory, and I'm afraid I've never found the time to sort it out properly.


FIX 'TOKEN NOT ALLOWED IN PDF STRING' LATEX ERRORS (2023-04-28)

When using the hyperref package with PDFLaTeX, things like section headings are written to the PDF meta-data. But if the LaTeX code contains characters that are not valid in a PDF string, they get dropped and this results in a warning such as:

Package hyperref Warning: Token not allowed in a PDF string (PDFDocEncoding)

To fix this, you can either provide a substitue string for the PDF meta-data in the problematic strings, like this:

\texorpdfstring{\gg}{>>}

Or provide a global substitute for any problematic commands, like this:

\pdfstringdefDisableCommands{%
  \def\gg{>>}%
  \def\ll{<<}%
}

2D ARRAY OF WORKSPACES ON GNOME 3 / UBUNTU 20.04 (2023-01-17)

Use the Workspace Matrix Gnome extension.


MERGE TWO VIDEO STREAMS SIDE BY SIDE (2022-05-31)

Use FFMPEG:

ffmpeg -i left.mp4 -i right.mp4 -filter_complex hstack output.mp4

See Merge two video clios into one


CROP PDF FILES (2022-05-09)

See suggestions at Ask Ubuntu: Command line tool to crop PDF files and Stack Exchange: PDF crop generates larger file


LATEX DOUBLE SUPERSCRIPT ERROR WITH ACCENTED CHARACTER

See Double superscript error involving tilde.


SET TITLE AND OTHER METADATA ON A PDF FILE (2021-11-09)

The command-line utility exiftool can be used to to this:

exiftool -Title="New Title" -Author="Joe Bloggs" -Subject="Foo" document.pdf

GNOME 3 TWEAKS FOR A 2D GRID OF WORKSPACES (2021-10-09)

https://kubos.cz/2018/07/19/ubuntu-18-workspaces-grid


REDUCE PDF FILE SIZE FROM THE COMMAND LINE (2021-04-21)

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=compressed_PDF_file.pdf input_PDF_file.pdf

The "/ebook" string can be changed to one of a number of settings. In increasing files zie: /screen, /ebook, /printer, /prepress, /default.


SANS SERIF SMALL CAPS IN LATEX (2020-10-07)

The default computermodern font does not have a sans serif small-caps variant, so will fall back to Roman is small-caps is requested. To get around this the sansmathfonts package can be used:

\usepackage[notmath]{sansmathfonts}

SET KEYBOARD SHORTCUT TO MOVE WINDOW TO ANOTHER SCREEN IN UBUNTU (2020-09-30)

See instuctions at Superuser.com: Move Window to another monitor in Ubuntu using Keyboard


USE THE WACOM ONE TABLET IN DUAL SCREEN MODE ON UBUNTU LINUX (2020-09-14)

The Wacom One tablet provides a screen and a stylus input. By default the stylus input is scaled to run across the whole of the dual screen area, so will not line up with the tablet display if it is only showing one half of the full screen area. To fix this, the command-line utility xsetwacom can be used. First run

xsetwacom --list devices

to find the name of the pointer device, then run

xrandr

to find the name of the output displays. Combine the two with (e.g.)

xsetwacom set "Wacom One Pen Display 13 Pen stylus" MapToOutput HDMI-2

to change the orientation. (The bit in the quotes is the device name from the first step. The final string is the display output from the second step.)

See the Linux Wacom Project for further details.


GET SANS-SERIF SMALL CAPS IN LATEX

There is no small caps version of the standard computer modern sans font, so LaTeX normally falls back to the roman serif version instead. You can either use a different fond family, via e.g.

\usepackage{libertine}

or

\usepackage{palatino}

Alternatively, the sansmathfonts package provides a computer modern sans small-caps variant. This can be enabled with

\usepackage[notmath]{sansmathfonts}

USE THE WACOM ONE TABLET IN PORTRAIT MODE ON UBUNTU LINUX (2020-06-26)

The Wacom One tablet provides a screen and a stylus input. To rotate the screen use the operating system screen settings. To rotate the stylus input to match, the command-line utility xsetwacom can be used. First run

xsetwacom --list devices

to find the name of the pointer device, followed by (e.g.)

xsetwacom set "Wacom One Pen Display 13 Pen stylus" rotate cw

to change the orientation. (The bit in the quotes is the device name from the first step. "cw" can be replaced by "none", "ccw", or "half" for the other orientations.)

See the Linux Wacom Project for further details.


PREVENT CHROME ON LINUX SAKING TO UNLOCK THE KEYRING (2020-06-11)

See Unbuntu Forums and Ask Ubuntu


DISABLE LOCATION BAR DROP-DOWN ON FOCUS (2020-04-09)

See: LifeHacker: How to Disable Firefox 75's New Address Bar


ENABLE "Create New Document" ON RIGHT CLICK IN UBUNTU (2020-04-07)

See: Tips on Ubuntu: Enable 'New Document' in Right-Click Menu in Ubuntu 19.10


USE AN OPUTBOUND SSH TUNNEL TO ALLOW INBOUND CONNECTIONS THROUGH A FIREWALL (2020-04-01)

You'll need a remote server that accepts inbound ssh connections.

First run this from the machine inside the firewall:

ssh -fNT -R 2222:localhost:22 user@remote-server

Then run this from anywhere on the internet:

ssh -J user@remote-server -p 2222 user@localhost

You can also adapt scp to use the same tunnel:

scp -o 'ProxyJump user@remote-server' -P 2222 source-file user@localhost:~/desination-file

FIX KAZAM SCREEN-CASTS NOT WORKING IN FIREFOX (AND OTHER PLAYERS) (2020-03-03)

See Kazam Issue 22

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -pix_fmt yuv420p -vcodec libx264 output.mp4

worked for me.


SET DEFAULT PRINTER IN FIREFOX ON LINUX

Use

lpoptions -d printer-name

to set the deafult in CUPS, which is then picked up by firefox (overwriting the about:config setting each time you go to print something).

For command line printing in bash, add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

export PRINTER=printer-name

For command line printing in csh, add the following to your ~/.cshrc or ~/.tcshrc:

setenv PRINTER printer-name

See Matt Cutts: Changing the default printer on Linux and Firefox


MANUALLY SAVE USERNAME AND PASSWORD IN FIREFOX (2019-06-21)

See Superuser: Manually add username/password to Saved Password list?


APACHE MOD_DEFLATE MESSED UP ETAG AND STOPS 403 RESPONSES (2018-09-27)

See Bug 54023 and this blog post.

A solution suggested above is to add

FileETag None

to your .htaccess file, which turns of etag's completely, fixing the issue.


FIX DROPBOX MENU ON SYS-TRAY ICON IN UBUNTU (2018-09-11)

The Dropbox system tray icon is broken for me on Ubuntu running metacity. The fix is apparently to run dropbox as

dbus-launch dropbox start

This prevents dropbox from using the indicator applet, so it then defaults to using the notification area. For the icon to show up, you'll need to make sure there is a "Notification Area" in the panel. You'll also need to make sure that the command above is used to start dropbox at login, which may also involve disabling the default autorun.


FIREFOX IS ALREADY RUNNING ERROR (2018-03-22)

A couple of times I've had Firefox crash on Linux and then refuse to restart, giving me the error message "Firefox is already running", which actually it's not. The cause is a locked profile. The solution is to manually delete the .parentlock file from your Firefox profile folder under ~/.mozilla/firefox/


BETTER PARAGRAPH SPACING IN LATEX (2018-02-14)

The traditional approach of using \setlength{\parskip} to add space between paragraphs leads to extra --- usually unwanted --- space being added between regular paragraphs and headings. The parskip package provides a better way of doing this.


PREVENTING DELAYED PLACEMENT OF LATEX FLOATS (2017-02-07)

Suggested code to allow a larger fraction of floats on a page before LaTeX places the floats on their own page and delays the placement:

\renewcommand{\topfraction}{0.9}       % max fraction of floats at top
\renewcommand{\bottomfraction}{0.8}    % max fraction of floats at bottom
\renewcommand{\textfraction}{0.07}     % allow minimal text w. figs
\renewcommand{\floatpagefraction}{0.7} % require fuller float pages

See https://aty.sdsu.edu/bibliog/latex/floats.html


CUSTOMIZE METACITY KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS IN UBUNTU > 14.x (2016-03-18)

The shortcuts (e.g. to switch workspaces and to move windows from workspace to another) are now somewhat hidden, but can be accessed using dconf-editor. They are stored in the location

org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings

BROKEN TITLES IN PDF FILES FROM LATEX USING DVIPS (2015-12-07)

If using latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf to generate PDF files from LaTeX, the title in the PDF metadata can get messed up by dvips incorrectly using titles from included eps graphics files. There are a few solutions, including using pdflatex directly or having a script to remove the offending SDict lines from the generated ps file.

For more details see: 1 and 2.


REMOVE METADATA FROM A PDF FILE

See https://gist.github.com/hubgit/6078384


ADD AN SSL CERTIFICATE TO CHROMIUM ON LINUX (2014-05-15)

Click on the lock on the location bar and view the certificate details. Save the certificate as "Base 64 ACSII (single certificate)" with a name such as cert.pem. Make sure the libnss3-tools package is installed. Then run:

certutil -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -A -t "P,," -n cert.pem -i cert.pem

Check the certificates installed using

certutil -d sql:$HOME/.pki/nssdb -L

See: StackOverflow


FONTS IN PNG TERMINAL IN GNUPLOT ON LINUX (2014-02-04)

Access TTF fonts by provising the full path to the .ttf file. e.g.

   set term png font "/urs/share/fonts/truetytpe/freefont/FreeSans.ttf,12"

CORRUPTED PDF FILES WHEN SAVED FROM FIREFOX'S BUILT-IN PDF VIEWER

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/972500 for a description of the problem and a solution. Apparently it should be fixed anyway in Firefox 26.


FIX "Message to save shrank" ERROR ON PINE WHEN USING EXCHANGE IMAP

Possible solution for Exchange 2010 found on Micorsoft Technet: Exchange 2010 - IMAP support - "Message to save shrank!"

"The solution is on a per-user basis to use Set-CASMailbox user -ImapUseProtocolDefaults:$false -ImapEnableExactRFC822Size:$true or on a server basis use Set-ImapSettings -EnableExactRFC822Size:$true

"Note that it will require additional overhead so I'd suggest only enabling the option for people using clients that exhibit the issue. Pine/Alpine is one and I've heard it reported with Thunderbird also."


SSH TUNNEL FOR WEB TRAFFIC WITHOUT A REMOTE PROXY SERVER (2012-06-28)

It is often useful to make your web traffic appear that it comes from a different computer. For instance my University has access to many online journals, and web requests from a University computer have access without needing to log in.

I had previously been using PuTTY to forward a local port on my home Windows computer to the appropriate port on my University's web cache server. My new University doesn't run a web cache / proxy so this method no longer works.

However it is still possible to use such such forwarding mechanism. There are two stages:

  1. Set up your SSH client (eg PuTTY) to do a dynamic forward of a (local) port, say 8080.

  2. Then configure your web browser to to use localhost:8080 as a SOCKS proxy.

(If you want your DNS requests to also go via the tunnel, you can set the Firefox setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true.)

For more detailed instructions, see ExtremeTech: Escaping the firewall with an SSH tunnel, SOCKS proxy, and PuTTY


USE CYGWIN TO CREATE A PORTABLE WINDOWS EXE FROM C++ CODE (2012-02-24)

g++-3 -mno-cygwin *.cpp

CONVERT AN A4 PS FILE INTO A CROPPED EPS FILE (2012-02-23)

Some journals require figures as a single .eps file, whereas I normally work with a combined eps+latex approach when generating figures from Gnuplot and XFig. To convert the figures from my working format to the requires eps format, I run a separate LaTeX document to render each figure. This gets me an A4 ps file, that needs to be converted to a cropped .eps file. To do this last step run:

ps2eps -B -C figure.ps
eps2eps -dNOCACHE figure.eps figure2.eps

The dNOCACHE option ensures that fonts aren't converted to bitmaps.


MAKE EPS+LATEX FILE FROM A FIG ON THE COMMAND LINE (2012-01-10)

To convert a *.fig file to eps+latex using the command line rather than XFig, you can use the fig2dev program. You need to run it twice: once to produce the *.pstex image file, and once to produce the *.pstex_t LaTeX picture file. You also need to provide the name of the *.pstex image to include in the *.pstex_t file. So:

fig2dev -L pstex foo.fig > foo.pstex
fig2dev -L pstex_t -p foo.pstex foo.fig > foo.pstex_t

C-x, C-c DOESN'T WORK IN EMACS ON CYGWIN (2011-11-20)

There is some interaction between C-c as an interrupt on Cygwin and the C-c key combination in Emacs. The solution given in http://superuser.com/questions/93771/c-x-c-c-not-working-in-emacs-23-1 of adding a Windows environment variable CYGWIN=tty fixed the problem for me.


STOP EMACS LATEX MODE FORMATTING SUB- AND SUPER-SCRIPS (2011-11-18)

Add the following to your .emacs file:

(eval-after-load "tex-mode" '(fset 'tex-font-lock-suscript 'ignore)) 

FIND YOUR .emacs FILE ON WINDOWS (2011-11-18)

C-x C-f ~/.emacs

since ~ will be expanded to whatever emacs things your home directory is.


AUTOMATICALLY CONVERT EPS FILES TO PDF WITH PDFLATEX (2011-09-18)

Add the following to the LaTeX preamble, after loading graphics or graphicx:

\usepackage{epstopdf}

USE ACROBAT READER (OR SOME OTHER SPECIFIC PROGRAM) (2011-02-18) TO OPEN PDF ATTACHMENTS IN PINE

The way attachments are handled in pine is controlled by two sets of settings files. The first 'mime-types' controls detection of what type of tile the attachment is. The second 'mailcap' defines which program should be used for opening files of a given type.

It's the second of these we need to alter in order to set a specific program for a specific file type. The default Unix pine configuration has a system-wide mailcap file, but will also look for ~/.mailcap -- any settings found there will over-ride corresponding settings in the system file.

To use acrobat for PDF files, I created ~/.mailcap and added the following line (based on what was already in the system file at /etc/mailcap):

application/pdf; acroread '%s'; nametemplate=%s.pdf; test=test "$DISPLAY" != ""

PREVENT IDLE SSH CONNECTIONS FROM TIMING OUT (2010-09-03)

Some networks will time out idle ssh connections after 10 minutes or so. This is annoying if you want to ssh to another computer to read email etc and want to retain the connection throughout the day.

The solution is to set the ssh client or server to send regular 'keep alive' packets through the connection to avoid the network form thinking it's idle.

To achieve this as a regular user, add the following line to your ~/.ssh/config file (which may need to be created first):

ServerAliveInterval 60 

which will then send packets every 60 seconds.


CHANGE THE FILL COLUMN in EMACS (2010-07-02)

Using M-q in emacs executes the fill-paragraph command, which word-wraps the lines to a standard width. That width can be changed by setting the value of 'fill-column'. The easy way to do this is to position the mark in the column you want, and then do C-u C-x f.


PREVENT BIBTEX FROM ADDING NON-CITED CROSS-REF'D ENTRIES (2010-04-08)

A feature of BibTeX means that if you use cross-referencing and then cite two or more items that cross-reference the same source, then the source gets added to the bibliography as a separate item. This may not be desirable.

To prevent this behaviour (or to alter the number of cross-references required) you can use the 'min-crossrefs' option when running BibTeX. To turn the feature off completely, add a very large number, eg

bibtex --min-crossrefs=500

If you run BibTeX from emacs using C-C,TAB, then you can change the default by adding the following to your .emacs file:

(setq tex-bibtex-command "bibtex --min-crossrefs=500")

CONVERT FILES FROM PDF TO EPS (2009-10-06)

Use pdftops with the -eps option, ie

pdftops -eps file.pdf

This only works if your PDF file has only one page (since EPS files can't have pages). If you have a multi-page PDF and want each page as a separate EPS file, then first split it using pdftk from http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

pdftk multipage-file.pdf burst

If you have a multipage PDF file and you want to extract bitmap images it contains, then you can do this with pdfimages

pdfimage -f<firstpage> -l<lastpage> file.pdf

This will output a set of .pbm and ppm files, which can be converted to other formats using the convert utility from ImageMagick.


FIX KEYBOARD REPEAT DELAY ON UBUNTU LAPTOP (2009-09-20)

Using Ubuntu on my Lenovo ThinkPad, the initial keyboard repeat delay was too short and the repeat rate too high. For some reason the graphical utility that should let you change this (System -> Preferences -> Keyboard) has no effect.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1003806 provides the following solution:

Use the command

kbdrate -r 24 -d 750

with sudo if necessary to adjust the rate and delay. Add this command to /etc/rc.local to have it executed each time on startup.

And

xset r rate 750 24

has a similar effect. But unfortunately neither affected the delay when using my wireless pointer, so I still need to be careful not to let me finger linger on the 'next slide' button for too long.


BETTER HYPHENATION IN LATEX WITH \RAGGEDRIGHT (2009-09-16)

Although I don't like using ragged right for documents, it's often mandated when writing grant proposals. However, LaTeX's standard hyphenation rules seem to overly discourage hyphenation when \raggedright is in effect. This results in a poor visual result and wasted space.

To overcome this, and get better hyphenation, try the ragged2e package, with

\usepackage[newcommands]{ragged2e}

the 'newcommands' option redefines the existing \raggedright etc commands to use the improved version. For details see:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/ragged2e.html


CROSSING OUT TERMS IN A LATEX EXPRESSION (2009-09-10)

The cross out a whole term in a LaTeX expression (eg because it it zero) you can use the "cancel" package, followed by \cancel, \bcancl, \xcancel, or \cancelto.

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/cancel.html

LOGITECH CORDLESS 2.4 GHz PRESENTER on LINUX (2009-08-14)

I recently purchased the above device which includes a laser pointer and a wireless forwards and back button for giving slide shows from a computer. I was specifically looking for something that would work with Linux and Adobe Reader, and not just PowerPoint on Windows.

Fortunately I wasn't disappointed and the device works seamlessly (you just have to pug in the USB receiver) on my Ubuntu desktop. Even the volume control worked. (The start presentation and black screen buttons send F5/Esc and '.', which are PowerPoint-specific, but other presentation apps may use them too.) It also worked on a colleague's Mac. The computer initially made a bit of a fuss about what sort of keyboard I was plugging in, but we told it it was some generic one and everything worked.

Logitech Support: 2.4 GHz Cordless Presenter


BULK UPDATE OF SYMLINK TARGETS (2009-05-12)

My sys-admin has recently moved the location of our home directories, and as a result a bunch of symlinks have been broken. The following command-line script finds all symlinks under the current directory, and replaces 'old' with 'new' in their targets:

for a in `find . -type l`; do
  b=`readlink $a | sed 's/old/new/'`;
  echo $a;
  ln -sf $b $a;
  done

FIXES FOR THE OXFORD DEBIAN -> UBUNTU UPGRADE (2009-01-08)

We've just had our computers upgraded from Debian to Ubuntu, and as a result several aspects of the desktop environment were changed (Metacity to Compiz) and various annoyances introduced. Here's my list of fixes to get things back how I want them:


HAVE WGET IGNORE ANY ROBOTS.TXT FILES IT ENCOUNTERS (2008-10-16)

Use:

wget -erobots=off http://www.example.org/

PRINTING UTF-8 WITH PERL (2008-07-09)

Apparently if you try to print a string containing UTF-8-encoded characters with Perl, strange things can happen with characters that can be presented in ISO-8859-1. It appears that strings containing only ASCII characters are fine, as are strings with higher-valued characters with no latin-1 counterpart. However strings containing only characters from the latin-1 set are output with the latin-1 encoding.

The solution (for printing to stdout) is include the following line in your code:

  binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';

For more details see: Perldoc: Binmode


FIREFOX STATUS BAR TEXT MISSING DESCENDERS ON WINDOWS (2008-07-07)

In my newly installed firefox 3 on windows, I had a problem with descenders being missed off the text in the status bar. A few pixels were missing so underscores appear as spaces, "q" as an "a", etc.

Thanks to (Mact.me: Firefox 3 Display Bugs?)[http://blog.mact.me/2008/06/20/firefox-3-display-bugs] I've discovered the cause and a solution. It appears that problem is due to (Gecko bug 417259)[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=417259], which only manifests itself due to a chrome CSS setting, made in this case by the forcastfox extension.

The workaround is to add the following to your userChrome.css file:

statusbar#status-bar {
  overflow-x : visible !important;
}

AUTO EXPORT BOOKMARKS FROM FIREFOX 3 (2008-06-16)

Thanks to http://kevin.colyar.net/posts/show/4

As of Firefox 3, bookmarks are saved in a places.sqlite database
file instead of the usual bookmarks.html file. ... To fix this, you
can configure Firefox 3 to auto-export your bookmarks to your
bookmarks.html file. To do this, enter about:config in your browser
location bar and change the browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML key to
true. Now when you exit Firefox, your bookmarks will be written to
your bookmarks.html file

This functionality is useful to me to allow me to automatically copy my bookmarks file to a web page, for easy access from anywhere I happen to be online.


PREVENT EMACS LEAVING SEMANTIC.CACHE FILES ALL OVER THE PLACE (2008-05-15)

Add the following to your .emacs file

(setq semanticdb-default-save-directory "~/.semantic")

where ~/.semantic can be a directory of your choice.


DISABLE SITE-WIDE LOADING OF AUCTEX IN EMACS (2008-05-15)

It appears that in Debian, the emacs package auctex gets loaded automatically (presumably from a site-start.el file or similar). This may not be what you want, and personally I find auctex very annoying (especially the change in font size and face).

One way to prevent auctex being loaded in this way (along with other local customisations) is to run emacs with the command:

emacs --no-site-file

Alternatively you can create an alias in your .bashrc file to use the above form when you type 'emacs':

alias emacs='emacs --no-site-file'

However, this method has the disadvantage of disabling all customisations that may have been applied locally, and also may not affect any copies of emacs run by your window manage or called as a helper application from other programs.

A better way to disable auctex is to add the following to you ~/.emacs startup file:

(if (featurep 'tex-site) (unload-feature 'tex-site t))

This looks to see if auctex has been loaded, and if so unloads it.


FIND OUT IF A CERTAIN PACKAGE IS INSTALLED ON DEBIAN (2008-05-09)

apt-cache policy <package-name>

AVOID SPELL-CHECKING ARGUMENTS OF CERTAIN LATEX COMMANDS

Need to customise the list:

ispell-tex-skip-alists

BEWARE THE APACHE OPTIONS DIRECTIVE IN .HTACCESS

If you use an Options directive in an .htaccess file, it appears that a statement such as

Options MultiViews

will be read in preference to any other Options directives in force and over-ride them, meaning that "MultiViews" is now the only option in force in that directory. The effects are not cumulative, unless explicitly stated by using the "+" modifier. So what you probably want to use is:

Options +MultiViews

which leaves any other options implemented in other places intact.

(This was causing me problems when trying to use mod_rewrite. "RewriteEngine on" and "Options MultiViews" both worked on their own, but together a default "AllowSymLinks" or "AllowSymLinksIfOwnerMatch" option was lost and then mod_rewrite threw lots of errors.)


MAKING MOVIES TO EMBED IN A PDFLATEX PRESENTATION

Embedded movies will only work in adobe reader on windows, and seem to need to be an .avi file. These can be created from a set of frames in .jpg format using the following command:

 mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=25 -o test.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800

See: http://electron.mit.edu/~gsteele/ffmpeg/


PROBLEM SETTING PDF META-DATA FROM LATEX USING GNUPLOT 4.2 EPSLATEX TERMINAL

As described at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/publ-tips/#pdfmark you can set various bits of PDF meta-data from within latex.

However, in gnuplot 4.2, the epslatex terminal produces eps files which also contain 'pdfmark' commands for setting the pdf meta-data. Unfortunately when such files are included in a LaTeX file, the included author, title, etc can over-write those specified from within LaTeX when a PostScript file is converted to PDF.

One possible kludge is to redefine the pdfmark command after the correct meta-data has been issued, so that any future invocations have no effect. This may have other unintended side effects though.

\special{! /pdfmark where
           {pop} {userdict /pdfmark /cleartomark load put} ifelse
           [ /Author (Markus G. Kuhn, Ross J. Anderson)
             /Title (Soft Tempest: Hidden Data Transmission
                     Using Electromagnetic Emanations)
             /Keywords (compromising emanations, data security,
                        eavesdropping)
             /DOCINFO pdfmark
           userdict /pdfmark /cleartomark load put  }

See this Usenet discussion of the problem.


FIREFOX HACKS

Set browser.backspace_action to 0 to make backspace go back in history rather than up the page in Linux.


CONVERT A COLOUR POSTSCRIPT FILE TO GREY-SCALE / BLACK AND WHITE

See: http://www-hermes.desy.de/notes/extras/postscript.html


ALLOW PLAYING OF AMAZON REALAUDIO CLIPS IN FIREFOX

Not a really a Linux tip, but something I figured out how to fix. The problem is that amazon audio clips redirect to a file named "hurl.exe". Despite the extension this is a text file and is served with a mime-type audio/x-pn-realaudio. The file contains the URL of the actual realaudio sound file.

Unfortunately, this mime type isn't registered by the firefox RealAudio plugin, and the fact that there's an .exe extension means the option presented to uses is to save the file. The solution I've found is to manually add the mime type to the mimeTypes.rdf file in your firefox profile directory. You are then able to select a default application to use the next time an attempt is made to open a file with such a mime type is accessed.

I found that adding the following to mimeTypes.rdf did the trick:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:audio/x-pn-realaudio"
                 NC:value="audio/x-pn-realaudio"
                 NC:editable="true">
  <NC:handlerProp RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:handler:audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin"/>
  <NC:handlerProp RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:handler:audio/x-pn-realaudio"/>
</RDF:Description>

Not that I really understand it though...


USEFUL IP ADDRESSES IN EVENT OF DNS FAILURE

micah.damtp.cam.ac.uk. 83807 IN A 131.111.16.37 hermes.cam.ac.uk. 86400 IN A 131.111.8.59 webserver.maths.nottingham.ac.uk. 3600 IN A 128.243.168.68 (www) www.nottingham.ac.uk. 3600 IN A 128.243.40.30 isa.nottingham.ac.uk. 3600 IN A 128.243.42.27 (owa) suiowa0.nottingham.ac.uk. 3600 IN A 128.243.42.26 (imap4)


CONVERTING EPS FILES TO BITMAP/RASTER FORMATS

By default ImageMagick seems to use fairly low resolution sampling, which results in a small but low quality raster image. To increase the resolution, use -density to set the sampling grid, For example:

convert -density 800x600 -resize 800x600 bar.eps bar.tiff

PREVENT EMACS FROM LOADING GLOBAL SETTINGS AFTER YOUR .EMACS FILE (2006-09-29)

With thanks to: http://rura.org/blog/2004/10/26/emacs-require-final-newline-on-fedora-how-to-kill-it/

It seems that on some red-hat derived systems (including Fedora and CentOS) emacs loads a global settings file at /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/default.el after the users .emacs file. This fail contains the declaration:

(setq require-final-newline 'ask)

which means every time you go to save a file which doesn't end in a new line, you're asked if you want to add one. To disable this you can use either

(setq require-final-newline t)

to silently add a new line, or

(setq require-final-newline nill)

to never add a new line, in your .emacs file. But then you need to prevent the global file from being loaded by also adding:

(setq inhibit-default-init t)

However, you may want to look at /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/default.el and copy any useful stuff from it (like wheel mouse scrolling) first.


PRETTY PRINTING OF SOURCE FILES

Use a2ps with the -E (enable pretty printing) and -g (maximum effects) options.


CONCATENATING / MERGING TWO OR MORE PDF FILES

Not sure how robust it is but

texexec --pdfarrange --noduplex --paper=A4 bar1.pdf bar2.pdf

just worked nicely on both things I tried. See also: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/pdf-append.php

Could also try PDFtk: http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/


PAPER SIZE CHANGED TO LETTER WITH PS2PDF

The script ps2pdf which converts postscript files to pdf, appears to sometimes ignore the paper size of the underlying file and create a PDF with the US Letter size. To fix this for A4 documents, use:

ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 bar.ps

The papersize option is from ghostscript (see 'man gs' for details). You can also set A4 as the default size by setting the following environment variable:

GS_OPTIONS='-sPAPERSIZE=a4'


REMOVING IMMEDIATE DUPLICATES FROM THE BASH HISTORY

add the following line to your .bash_profile file:

export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

For more details, search for HISTCONTROL in the bash man page.

Also of interest, is that you can use [ctrl]+r on the command line to initiate a reverse interactive search (as in emacs) through your bash history.


FIX MAPLE 9.5 BROKEN WINDOW POSITIONING

At least under fvwm, at startup maple 9.5 positions its main window a few pixels left and up from where it was last time. The inside corner of the border and title bar appears to be placed where the outside top left hand corner was before.

The following alias causes the initial placement of the window to be in the top left of the screen.

alias xmaple="perl -pi~ -e 's/MDIPosX.*$/MDIPosX=5/;s/MDIPosY.*$/MDIPosY=23/' ~/.maple9.5rc; xmaple95"

If you're using the single document interface, you will need to change all occurrences MDI to SDI in the above.


GLOBAL FIND AND REPLACE IN MULTIPLE FILES

To replace all occurrences of 'bar' with 'bar' in files matching *.txt, use:

perl -pi~ -e 's/bar/bar/g' *.txt

UN-ROTATE AXIS LABELS IN GNUPLOT EPSLATEX TERMINAL

Unlike the pslatex terminal, there is no option not to rotate the y-axis label with the epslatex output. Instead, the following Perl one-liner can be used to remove all "\rotatebox" commands from the tex file. Prefix with an exclamation mark to execute from within a gnuplot source file:

!perl -pi~ -e 's/\\rotatebox\{90\}//g' output.tex

FIX BROKEN EPS FILES FROM GNUPLOT EPSLATEX TERMINAL

A bug in gnuplot 4.0 causes the eps files produced by the epslatex terminal to star with "%%!" rather than the standard "%!". This causes the file to print as text, rather than postscript, when sent to a postscript printer. This can be fixed by the following Perl one-liner inserted in a gnuplot script file:

!perl -pi~ -e 's/\A%%!/%!/' output.eps

ALTERING THE PAPER SIZE AND ORIENTATION IN XDVI

xdvi -paper a4r bar.dvi

EMACS SHORTCUT KEYS REFERENCE

Useful reference cards for Emacs and XEmacs can be found at: http://www.refcards.com/


PRINTING FROM EMACS WITH YOUR DEFAULT UNIX PRINTER

Add the following to your .emacs file, which will set the emacs variable printer-name to the value of the $PRINTER environment variable:

(setq printer-name (getenv "PRINTER"))

PRINTING MULTIPLE PAGES PER SHEET AND BOOKLETS

If necessary, you first need to create a postscript file of your document.

Use 'psnup -n [input.ps] [output.ps]' where n is a power of two giving the number of document pages per side of paper. Remember that for 2, 8, 32, etc pages per side, it will be landscape, so you'll need to select 'short' if duplexing. For other options see the man page. For example:

psunp -2 -pa4 bar.ps | lpr -Ph1-short

If you want to make (say) an A5 booklet out of a ps file, with each A4 sheet of paper holding two A5 pages (four sides of the booklet) then the pages will need reordering to be printed correctly. Use something like

psbook [input.ps] [output.ps]

Then, psnup -2 can be used to get the pairs of book pages on the arranged on the physical A4 pages.

There is a more sophisticated command, pstops, which allows much more control over positioning and zoom. For A4 LaTeX documents which have large margins, it is often desirable not to shrink the text as much when printing multiple pages per sheet. The following command is appropriate for the margins on JFM papers:

pstops '2:0L@.9(23.9cm,-1.9cm)+1L@.9(23.9cm,12.86cm)' in.ps out.ps

It can be combined with psbook and lpr using pipes in the usual way.

See also http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/~ken/psbind/ which may be able to achieve similar results by automatically detecting the margins.


COMBINING MULTIPLE POSTSCRIPT FILES INTO A SINGLE MULTI-PAGE DOCUMENT

The command psmerge is supposed to work for the case where the files were created by the same program with the same settings (i.e. have the same preamble). However, I couldn't get this to work when wanting to merge several gnuplot graphs.

Instead, I manually cat'd the files together, then edited by hand with emacs to remove the duplicated preambles, and add the correct page numbers.

Each file was of the form:

%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%%Title: bar.ps

  [Prolog Stuff]

%%EndProlog
%%Page: 1 1

  [Document Stuff]

end
showpage
%%Trailer
%%DocumentFonts: Helvetica
%%Pages: 1

It seemed to work by removing form the prolog stuff from all but the first file, and removing from %%Trailer to the end from all but the last file. Then the page numbers needed correcting, as did the total page count on the last line.


EDITING POSTSCRIPT FILES IN XFIG

pstoedit -f fig input.ps output.fig

EXTRACTING TEXT AND IMAGES FROM PDF FILES

pdftotext

pdfimages 

CONVERTING .JPEG FILES TO .EPS WITHOUT UNCOMPRESSING

The jpeg2ps program adds an eps wrapper around a jpeg file to allow a postscript interpreter to parse the existing jpeg data. This results in much smaller files (typically only about a 20-30% increase on the original jpeg).

See: [1] for more information and free download.

There's also a similar programme jpeg2eps written in postscript. It's described at [2].


SETTING A LOCAL DIRECTORY FOR COMMON LATEX FILES

Add the following line to your .bash_profile file:

export TEXINPUTS=".:~/texcommon//:"

where 'texcommon' is the name of the folder you wish to use. The '.' at the start ensures the folder from which you run latex is searched first. '//' searches all sub-folders. The colons act as a separators. Including ':' at the end, allows normal tex path to be appended later.

With this setting, when looking for any input files and packages, LaTeX will first search the current folder, then the '~/texcommon' folder (and all its sub-folders), and finally the usual path defined for your system.

The environment variables BIBINPUTS and BSTINPUTS work similarly to define search paths for .bib and .bst files respectively.


RELATIVE DIRECTORIES WHEN SPLITTING LATEX INPUT

The package import.sty allows files to be input from different directories and further files referenced in input and includegradphics commands are taken relative to the location of the file in which they occur.


INCLUDE REFERENCE NUMBERS FROM AN EXTERNAL LATEX FILE

\usepackage{xr}
\externaldocument[prefix]{filename}

CAPTURE SOME OR ALL OF THE X11 DISPLAY AND WRITE TO AN IMAGE FILE

You can use the import command from ImageMagick. The simplest thing to type is:

import bar.png

and then drag out a rectangle on the screen. The file extension (where recognised) will determine the appropriate output format.

See `man import' for details, and other variants.


MAKING OHP SLIDES / PDF PRESENTATION WITH LATEX

I've used the foilTeX package, which is available on the DAMTP system. However, if the DAMTP version is out of date it may contain a couple of annoying features (e.g. dvi/ps rotation problem) which can be fixed if you get the latest version. e.g. download the class files to you common latex directory (see above).


COLOURS, IMAGES, ROTATING, AND SCALING WITH LATEX

All these can be accomplished using packages from the graphics bundle, which is usually already installed by default. You just need to have the relevant \usepackage{} statement in your preamble to enable the commands you wish to use. Links to documentation and the installation files can be found here:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/grfguide.html

Or the UK mirror:

http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/grfguide.html


USING LaTeX TO GENERATE PDFs AND DVIs FROM THE SAME DOCUMENT

If you're working on a LaTeX document which needs to be passed through LaTeX and pdfLaTeX, you can save having to continuously change between using the dvips and pdftex driver options using something like this:

\ifx\pdfoutput\undefined
  \documentclass[...,dvips]{...}
\else
  \documentclass[...,pdftex]{...}
\fi

If images are included without the extension to their name, then the pdfLaTex and LaTeX will (if setup well) look for appropriate extensions (eg .eps for LaTeX, and .pdf .png .jpg for pdfLaTeX). You will of course need to provide all your images in two different formats.

You can add \usepackage{epstopdf} to your preamble which will automatically create pdf version of any pdf-less eps files when pdfletex is run. However, better results will probably be obtained by generating a pdf directly from the image/diagram source where possible.


COMPRESSING LARGE EPS FILES FOR USE WITH LATEX

from http://www.dd.chalmers.se/latex/tips_e.html

If you have a large picture that takes up a lot of space on your account, you can compress it using gzip and then include it in your document.

If you have a picture called pic.eps, you proceed like this: Copy the row in pic.eps that begins with %%BoundingBox to a new file called pic.eps.bb. Then compress the picture using the gzip command: `gzip pic.eps' Include the picture in your LATEX document like this:

\begin{figure}[!ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm]{pic.eps.gz}
\caption{A compressed picture.}
\end{figure}

You may also be able to get away with omitting the .eps.gz from the filename. This can be useful if you also have a png/jpg/pdf version (with the same filename stem) for use with pdfLaTeX. LaTeX / pdfLaTeX should be able to choose the appropriate format.


TO DISPLAY THE LABELS USED IN A LATEX FILE IN THE OUTPUT

Try adding one of

\usepackage{showlabels}
\usepackage{showkeys}

to the preamble. The former just prints the label names in the margin when they're defined. The latter also prints them in the text when they're referenced, though this can be disabled with something like:

\usepackage[notref,notcite]{showkeys}

OTHER POTENTIALLY USEFUL LATEX PACKAGES TO INVESTIGATE

dropcaps.sty dropping.sty for drop caps

floatflt.sty wrapfigure.sty for text-wrapped figures and tables (Also floatfig, a deprecated version of floatflt).

appendix.sty for allowing sub-appendices within chapters (or sections)


START PINE WITH A DIFFERENT INBOX

pine -inbox-path=/home/MAIL/$USER

To do this every time, you can either set up a bash alias, or alter your .pinerc file.


MOUNT SAMBA SHARES VIA COMMAND LINE OVER SSH TUNNEL

First run to set up a bash session

dbus-launch bash

Then use

gvfs-mount smb://A/some_share

to mount the shared drive.

See https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1390955