PDFpen Tip: Compilations Made Simple

Philip Blog, PDFpen Tips, TextExpander Tips

scooterWe got this email from BJ Strass, the publisher of Scooter Rider:

I finally am getting around to letting you know how much PDFpen has helped me out. It has saved me countless hours of reworking and reformatting prior PDFs. I produce a small magazine and after 4 years we decided to offer full year Journals — all the issues for each year in a formatted paperback book available through Lulu.com.

The problem was that over the years we used 3 types of software in the layout, different image formats, and some variation in size format. I tried no less than 6 pieces of software and many, many methods and it began to look like we were either going to abandon the project, due to time, or redo all layout from scratch, then I stumbled on PDFpen. Rather than having to redo everything we did a ‘tune-up’ on each issue in its relative layout software, printed each issue as a PDF, then combined, resized and arranged the entire year in PDFpen. It was great! I give the gang at SmileOnMyMac my grateful appreciation. If you are interested you can see the store at www.lulu.com/bj1056

Thanks again for making a great piece of very useful software, that like a Mac, it just works well.

Our thanks go to BJ for sharing his PDFpen experience–and a copy of TextExpander too! Send your user tips to jean@smileonmymac.com; if we post your tip, you’ll get a complimentary copy of any of our products.

The Really Big Apple

Philip Blog, Public Appearances

Bob Dylan exhibit at the Morgan, Steve Reich at Carnegie Hall), and a moment of pure geek tourism: visiting the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. Jean at the NYC Apple Store The Apple logo was red in honor of the Project (RED) iPod. The entrance is very groovy, with the whole underground thing. You can take a cylindrical glass elevator car or a glass spiral staircase down to the main floor. My friend Barbara bought an iPod case. I didn’t buy anything. (With no sales tax in my home state, so I almost never buy something in NYC I can get in Portland…) Barbara gave me her Apple Store 5th Avenue bag. That’s what good friends are for. (They’re also for snapping really touristy photos of you on busy streets without complaining.) The depressing part of the visit was across the street: The Plaza Hotel under scaffolding, destined to metamorphose into “elegant private residences”. Ugh. As far as I’m concerned, the only one who should be allowed to actually live at the Plaza is Eloise, of course.

PDFpen Tip: Math Margin Notes

Philip Blog, PDFpen Tips, TextExpander Tips

For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to add math margin notes to a PDF. With OS X’s PDF-based display, this seemed like it should be possible, but Acrobat doesn’t do it. It cannot accept PDFs that are drag/dropped or pasted. I was even considering writing some tool to do it, but I found the way: a combination of LaTeX Equation Editor (free, great with Keynote) and PDFpen. With these two programs, you can type LaTeX into LaTeX Equation Editor, then drag-and-drop the resulting mini PDF onto your PDF in PDFpen, resize it there, and save. [sample below] LaTeX PDFpen example One caveat is that PDFpen has to be in pointer mode or have most recently used the insert-image-or-PDF button; if it’s in scribble or other annotation mode it does not accept the drop. Nowadays, most of my knowledge of complex mathematical equations comes from watching the (improbable but entertaining) TV show NUMB3RS, but the tip itself made sense to me.

TextExpander Tip: Roll Your Own Site Search

Philip Blog, TextExpander, TextExpander Tips

Organize your abbreviations by context:

Ever find a website that doesn’t have a search function? For me that site is Palm Addicts (http://palmaddict.typepad.com). Problem is that I can never remember the URL, and even if I could, that’s a lotta typing. Google will let you restrict their results to a website by adding “site:domain.here” such as “site:palmaddict.typepad.com” to your search string. I have a TextExpander shortcut “/spa” (Search Palm Addicts). I enter it in the Google search field and it expands to: %| site:palmaddict.typepad.com %| (percentage and pipe character) tells TextExpander to reposition the cursor at the beginning, so I can enter the search string at the beginning without having to manually move the cursor. I type in the word “calendar” and Google shows me all the Palm Addict pages that have the word “calendar” in them.
This would be useful even if a site had a search function. You could skip the steps of 1) going to the web site, 2) tabbing to the search box and 3) entering your search term – just go right to the Google search field in your browser and enter your TextExpander abbreviation.