Creating PDFs is difficult. Creating PDFs for print is even more difficult. Reportlab does a great job, but it defaults to RGB in most cases. This necessitates some tweaking of both Reportlab code and the code using Reportlab. Testing the result is difficult, mostly because I don’t know of any command-line tools to do preflight testing for RGB and CMYK elements.
What I need is a command-line tool to do some basic PDF preflighting (eg. non-CMYK elements, non-embedded fonts, images below 300dpi, characters which may cause difficulties in printing, etc.). Is that so much to ask? When the PDF spec is 1300 pages long, it is. Still, don’t think I won’t try and take a stab at it.
On Monday individuals from the four websites who collected TTC website suggestions from the Toronto community through their weblogs released their findings to the TTC and the general public. They did so in the worst way possible; using a spreadsheet. These are four fairly successful websites, all … Read more
When I released my new Toronto transit map I promised to release some of the tools I used to create it. Possibly the most useful tool I created is my command-line tile cutter. True, there are other image tilers, such … Read more
It’s not very well documented, but it’s possible to include multiple conditional expressions in a single if statement in BASH. By multiple conditional expressions, I mean something like:
if foo = 1 or bar = 3 or abc = 4 then print Hello World end if … Read more
Here I was thinking that my old TTC map was only helping a few dozen people a day. In goes my updated map and up go my visits by several hundred per day. It turns out that I was closing … Read more