OS X and Linux tips

I thought it would be a good idea to keep a record of some useful things for Linux and OS X machines.

OS X

• Getting small PDF files

By default, OS X produces the largest PDF files I've every seen. There are all sorts of ways you can get around this, but the best I've come across is the following:

1) Select: file::print

2) From Copies & Pages select: ColorSync

3) From Quartz Filter select: Reduce File Size

4) From PDF select: Save as PDF

This can reduce the size of the PDF by a factor of 10. Images are slightly reduced in quality, but not severely. A note here: there appear to be two Quartz filters "Reduce file size" and "Reduce File Size". Use the latter.

Of course, LaTeX does the same without any trouble, so perhaps we should just use LaTeX!--alston 15:21, 11 December 2007 (GMT)

• A nice terminal

iTerm is a great choice for a terminal under OS X. Of course, Konsole is better, but that requires the Qt libraries. You will have to tweak the setup of iTerm to get it to look and work like Konsole. I'll put up some suggestions later.

• LaTeX and presentations

If you like to insert LaTeX formulae, tables or text in presentations, use LaTeXiT. It's free (but please give this guy something) and amazingly useful.

Linux

ALT-Printscreen gets you PNG screenshots (thanks, Alston!)

A quick comment: ALT-Printscreen will dump the current window to a PNG file. To get the entire screen, use just Printscreen.--alston 14:27, 1 July 2008 (BST)

perl -pi -e 's/old string/new string/' list_of_files 

is equivalent to

for file in list_of_files; do
    sed -e 's/old string/new string/' $file > tmp
    mv tmp $file
done

Links

• More tips can be found on the Wales Group page under Useful linux stuff - still very much under construction!
• Installing python modules