[ubuntu-in] So what magick did you do this week on your ubuntu linux

[Ramnarayan.K]

Hi

Sounds like a strange question for an ubuntu linux list.

Between 1st January 2013 and now there have been 55 threads and from
June to now just 9 threads. So the last few months have been slow
and the  activity on this list has been muted so thought it would be
interesting to write about and ask what interesting things people have
been doing with the ubuntu linux systems.

What interesting software, CLI commands and things, any work of art etc


After nearly a decade of using linux the past one week has been revealing for me
1. I managed to successfully install LAMPfor quite a while and
2. rediscovered the joy of inkscape and gimp
3. And figured that the command line is getting more impressive each day.
4. Got help to know that some open source accounting packages are
maturing nicely


Also discovered hidden treasures in other Desktop Interfaces and that
one would normally not come across simple because of trying a new
linux os or a new Desktop Interface.

**
The past week I was helping with work on a map . We used GIMP to trace
a hand drawn map and then used inkscape to add a lot of details.

Only today we realized that on inkscape one could take a section of a
raster image and using the Object to path and then Trace Path function
 convert it to a svg path (albeit with a tonne load of nodes) but
incredible.

Then we had to compile a text file (using libreoffice writer)  and an
image file (svg to pdf) into one consolidated pdf file. For most
images its easy to insert the images into the writer document, but we
wanted the map to retain its much higher dpi so we printed the map to
300 dpi from inkscape.

So while the writer file with pics was all A4 the map was way larger
and it needed to be scaled to a4 retaining its dpi

This is when imagemagick showed its true magick
the convert function is absolutely amazing
it can convert almost any image format to another using the simple
syntax, it can even work with pdf's

*convert foo.png to foo.jpeg*

or
*convert manyfoo.png to onefoo.pdf*

(where png may be any of the popular image file formats - so yes it
can convert many image files into one pdf)

or convert a large size (as in page size) pdf to a smaller size pdf
but retain its dpi

*convert Source.pdf -density "300" -resize "2480x3508" target.pdf*

where -density is the source  resolution in dpi and -resize is the
target page size (also in pixel)

Quite simply amazing


For those working on pdf's then
needless to say pdftk is our best friend

*To Compress pdf'*

 Ever had the need to compress pdf's and needed it done really quickly
without messing with image dpi's and other stuff.

well try the following
*ps2pdf sourcepdffile.pdf targetfile.ps*

then run

*ps2pdf targetfile.ps to outputfile.pdf*

Delete the ps and sourcepdf file after the job is done.
You will be amazed at the results - both the much smaller file size
and the retention of the quality of the output.

There are pdf compressing scripts (mostly for nautilus) - but they may
not all work on all Desktop interfaces ?

**
Batch convert gimp xcf files to more usable files (png for example)
*xcf2png sourcefile.xcf -o outputfile.png*
or

*xcf2png *.xcf -o *.png *



**
However all is not hunky dory
have been trying to get a wacom intuos 4 tablet to work in tablet to
screen mode and that is an extreme paid. A solution is / was to use a
kde interface which actually has a option to set up and configure
wacom type tablets. Installed kde over my mate / xfce / ubuntu studio
interfaces. Needless to say am not a huge fan of kde . The problem of
"tablet to scree remains"

But in installing kde discovered a software called photo layout editor
(seems to come bundled with kde) this is a quick, very quick easy way
of putting together a bunch of pictures together. GIMP can do the same
but photo layout editor has some amazing things - it has absolutely 0
response time, once can move pics around, scale and crop them, add
some simple effect, add a background change the canvas size and so on.
It starts to fall flat when one want more polish and more control. But
for a quick job its amazing.


**
In case folks are wondering about the various command line functions
given , if for some reason they don't work then you may need to
install those specific packages.
The easy way is
*sudo apt-get install "package name" *

without the " "'s
like
*sudo apt-get install pdftk*

for the convert function one needs to install imagemagick (where
convert is one of the many functions of imagemagick)

**
All told linux is truly magical

and I look foward to hearing some of your magical experiences too.

regards
Ram
PS My previous mail was too big so it was waiting for moderator
approval - hence reposting in plain text format
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