Format issues

Getting rid of Microsoft's newline

Sometimes you are confronted with lines where the newline symbols appears like a horrible ^M. E.g., when you export from Excel to text files. This is because the newline character is \r\n, instead of the classical \n. To get rid of them:

tr '\r\n' '\n' < badfile.txt > goodfile.txt

Printing

Animated PDF presentations

In order to create multi-layer ("animated") images in a PDF presentation prepared with PPower 4, create an image using different layers with Xfig (each object has a "depth" field that defines its layer), save is e.g. as

image.fig

. Transform it into a multi-MPOST file by:

> fig2dev -Lmmp image.fig > image.mmp
> mpost image.mmp

This creates the files

image.0 , image.1, ...

Changing format

Here the printers can only print on A4 paper. To print a letter-formated postscript file they must be preprocessed:

% mpage -1o amer.ps > euro.ps
% lpr euro.ps

GIF/JPG/PNG to .eps (for latex)

Open xfig, click the button "Figure" or "Image", click the mouse to create a box, chose the file to download (there are options for the size). The image appears on the screen. Then choose "File>Export" and save as *.eps.

The resulting image can be included in a Latex file using for instance:

\begin{figure}
\includegraphics{myfile.eps}
\end{graphics}

Multi-page

To print several pages per sheet preprocess your ps file with mpage:

% mpage -4 a.ps b.ps > result.ps
% lpr result.ps

The image can be modified by xfig if you want. You can even add equations by typing the corresponding latex as text.

Installing packages for Latex

After installing a new package don't forget to update the index: as a root, type:

$ texhash

$ mktexlsr

depending on your system.

Reading files

PDF

Instead of acroread you can use gv to read a PDF file

% gv file.pdf

Limiting access on web page

To limit the access on some directories of your web page, create a file .htaccess in it (such as this one