olpa, OSS developer

Theoretically, a part of a PDF file is allowed to be stored externally. The “external streams” were introduced already in an ancient PDF specification. But only Acrobat (Reader) 5 supports it. For Acrobat 8, one has to find a hidden security option to activate support. Apple Quartz seems not to support external streams at all. The same for poppler (definitely, the source code is checked) and maybe its ancestor xpdf.

My paper “XML to paper publishing with manual intervention” is accepted for XATA 2010 (XML: Aplicações e Tecnologias Associadas), 19 and 20 May, Vila do Conde, Portugal. Abstract:

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I’ve noticed that headers and footers of the documents, generated by XeLaTeX, use some other font instead of Helvetica. After digging into the LaTeX code, the problem is solved.

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I wanted to convert text to curves in PostScript. The well-known tool to do it is pstoedit (alternatives are welcome). Unfortunately, it worked only partially.

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There is a number of XML-editors, but there are no user-friendly ones (except FraemMaker). A standard XML editor is a tool for programmers, to play with XML. But technical writers need an user-centric XML editor, to play with a document, not with XML.

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I’m not the only one who works on a publishing server. Steve Whitlatch announced recently Mr. XML Publisher for DocBook, a free online publishing server. You feed a DocBook to the service, and the service returns back the corresponding PDF.

When I print books, I prefer to have two pages per sheet. With PostScript or PDF books it’s easy, I just use psnup2.pl. But for djvu format, the procedure is complicated.

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I’ve prepared a poster. For the development purposes, the paper size is A4. Now I need to enlarge the paper size. Here is a sequence of the commands which got the things done:
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A paper about TeXML and Consodoc is published in TUGboat 28:1, 2007: TeXML: Resurrecting TeX in the XML world. Also, the tools were presented as a poster at XML Prague 2007 conference: “XML to beautiful documents: TeXML and Consodoc“.

I like Prague, it’s a very beautiful city. My contribution to XML Prague 2007:
* paper “Generative XPath”
* presentation slides
* poster XML to beautiful documents, and how it looked like

In addition to my talk “Generative XPath” at XML Prague 2007, I decided to submit also a poster:

Title: XML to beautiful documents

Abstract: I’d like to present an alternative to XSL-FO. Using TeX to create PDF from XML is an old trick, but thanks to TeXML (an XML syntax for TeX) and Consodoc (a publishing server), the process is greately simplified and the produced documents are of high quality.

* http://getfo.org/texml/ — URL linking to a web page related to the poster.
* http://consodoc.com/

A new tool from me. Psnup2.pl puts two PostScript pages onto one page. It is similar to “psnup -2″, but
* psnup2.pl drops the margins, and
* zooms the pages as much as possible.

Recently I updated ghostscript, and it stopped working even on its own examples:

$ pwd
/usr/share/ghostscript/8.15/examples
$ ps2pdf alphabet.ps ~/a.pdf
ERROR: /invalidfont in findfont
Operand stack:
   (Palatino-Italic)   Font   (Palatino-Italic)   228176   (Palatino-
   Italic)   --nostringval--   (Palatino-Italic)   URWPalladioL-Ital
   Times-Italic   NimbusRomNo9L-ReguItal
Execution stack:
...

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