Pablo Endres's Blog » Open Source

Merging PDF files

Pablo Endres — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:37:24 +0000

Have you ever scanned a pile of documents on a “non enterprise” o home scanner, or just got distracted when using the big Xerox machine in the office. You’ll end up with a ton of individual pdf files. After a little google and man reading I found these 2 solutions.

On linux just use pdfmerge: sudo yum install pdfmerge or download the windows version
Do it by hand with ghostscript:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf Scan001.pdf Scan002.pdf

picasa and Fedora 10

Pablo Endres — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:36:28 +0000

It’s really been a while since a sent my last update with pictures of what I’ve done. I normally try to keep friends and family up to date on what I’ve been doing since I moved to the other side of the Atlantic (to the European side). So today I fired up picasa to get the web albums up2date and nothing happend. When I ran it in a shell this came out:

[host]:/home/epablo:\>picasa
/usr/bin/picasa: line 139: 25634 Segmentation fault “$PIC_BINDIR”/wrapper check_dir.exe.so
/usr/bin/picasa: line 175: 25734 Segmentation fault “$PIC_BINDIR/wrapper” regedit /E $registry_export HKEY_USERS\\S-1-5-4\\Software\\Google\\Picasa\\Picasa2\\Preferences\\

After googling for I while I didn’t find any reasonable explanation for the error. I did find a beta (comming from google what could I expect) repository (here are the instructions on how to set it up) and upgraded from picasa-2.7.3736-15 to picasa-3.0.5744-02

It started up, I’ll keep you posted on how it goes with the field try..

Opensource replacement for Visio

Pablo Endres — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:37:35 +0000

I’ve been looking actively for an open source replacement for Visio, the programs work but the main weakness is the lack of the “stencils” or figures to make the diagrams. The artwork that I found is really lacking the help of a designer.

I checked out Dia 0.96.1 which I had used before and it works really good but as I stated before it lacks the artwork. The good thing is that there is hope, as stated in it’s web site: “It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.”

Open Office Draw 2.4.1 is also suitable for the job. I personally it is a little more limited than Dia for the job, but maybe it’s just my impression. As a drawing tool it is more complex and give you more for your Money effort like object rotation, and other effect.

Kvio 1.6.3 is also a nice tool. I have to say that it works really well. It’s light and has good handling of stencils, they get extra points because it automatically finds and uses the Dia stencils. The only thing I really don’t handle well yet is that all objects when placed on the sheet a TOO BIG.

Is there a chance that someone with good graphic skills opens an Open Source project to make some standard shapes or stencils that can be used by all 3 tools or any other tools that wants to use them. If a momentum is created it is also possible to make the Vendors want to publish their shapes in this standard format.