This page is under (re-)development.
Assorted Software
This page contains an assortment of software bits and pieces (and one
or two larger projects), mostly concerned with typesetting and
multi-lingual editing. I've given each item a quality description,
as follows:
- Supported means that I consider the software to be of
reasonable quality (including documentation), and that I will
do my best to fix any problems or implement any suggested
improvements.
- Unsupported means that it was once in supported
shape, but I no longer promise to do anything more with
it.
- Alpha means it would like one day to be supported,
but is (perhaps very) rough around the edges, like an early
alpha release.
- Kludge means this is something I put together to do a
job, and thought might be useful. However, there's probably no
documentation, no error-checking, and it might delete all your
files.
Scaling PDF/PS for A4
Papers published in most journals, or in LNCS, are on a
smaller-than-A4 paper size. This is a pain, as we all have A4
printers. The autoscale Perl kludge
takes a
PDF or PostScript file as first argument or stdin, analyses the image page
size, throws away outliers (such as the first page added by JSTOR),
scales it to fit on A4 paper with 1cm margins, and sends the resulting
PostScript to stdout. I usually print the result 2-up.
It assumes the usual bunch of stuff a TeX-hacker's Unix machine will
have: specifically, pdftops (usually in poppler-tools), the
Netpbm package, GhostScript, and pstops (usually in psutils).
Games
My supported network Mah-Jong program is held elsewhere.
Printer drivers
My supported Unix driver program for the (sadly no longer made)
Citizen Printiva and Alps MD printers is held elsewhere.
TeX and friends
I have a couple of supported fonts defined with Metafont for use with TeX;
they are a little font containing the extra letters used for Old
English text; Tolkien's tengwar and cirth; sans-serif math italic for
Computer Modern.
The unsupported file rule.tex contains TeX
macros which can be used to set proof trees (that grow downwards). You
probably don't want to use them, since there must be dozens of LaTeX
packages to do the task better.
Emacs, VM and friends
Here can be found small things for Emacs and VM.
Facebook tidy for Firefox/Stylus
Facebook's layout is horrible, and the new 2020 layout is worse.
The kludge Facebook_tidy.user.css
is a style for the Firefox/Chrome Stylus extension. It suppresses the
right hand panel, gives the feed more space, and hides some other
things that annoy me. Read the source to see what, and adapt as you
please. Suggestions for improvements are welcome.
Julian Bradfield
Last modified: Sat Feb 25 09:57:17 GMT 2023