Suren's Weblog » GlugT

Merging multiple PDF files in Linux

suren — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 07:15:52 +0000

I always had trouble maintaining multiple PDF’s of same genre. A simple command – pdftk will do the trick of merging them together into a single PDF file. pdftk is present in Ubuntu repository itself.

Using the command is also very simple.

pdftk input1.pdf input2.pdf … cat output output.pdf

so if a.pdf, b.pdf so on are the pdf files u want to merge and the output file is combined.pdf then the command will be

pdftk a.pdf b.pdf cat output combined.pdf

Now if you a folder full of pdf files that you have to merge into a single pdf file , you can give something like

pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf

The only problem being that *.pdf might not take the input in the order you want. So you have to name the files such that doing an ls in the directory gives the files in the order in which you wanted them to be merged in the final output pdf file. say file00.pdf file01.pdf and so on.

The command liner !

suren — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:05:24 +0000

Probably one of the features that amazes me in Linux are the power and cuteness of the command line applications ! Right now but for watching videos, working with images , I have found ways to do stuff entirely on the terminal. Whats better ?? Its fast – really fast and completly productive. Let me brief few of my recent infatuations in command line apps.

* Every wonder how fast your browser can be in Elinks ??? No pop ups, no images, but absoultely cool plain test views,option to see images using eog , tabbed browsing, history, bookmarks, history : everything one might need in a modern day browser. It doesnt crash , doesn’t require extra plugins for working. Actually above anything else its the speed of browsing is what that beats me ! Too good. Check my gmail window in elinks

* Okay , One thing Elinks might not have is the chat feature. But there is a better client than that. Finch : Welcome to the command line Pidgin. If you already new Pidgin, then Finch is the exact ditto for the shell and If you didn’t know about Pidgin, u are missing something With Finch u can GTalk , AIM chat , yahoo , IRC , jabber talk and lots more. Once again the simplicity and speed beats any other application.

* And for everything there is Emacs plus shell combination. So the only thing I need the GUI is for watching videos and similar stuff where GUI is not a luxury but plain necessity.

* Of course I am still on the learning curve for Emacs and so sometimes when going gets tough I use Gedit. Now something great about gedit is that one can extend it in large ways to suit one’s need. With a good GTKSourceview color scheme and font selection , coding can be a wonderful experience. (Gedit doesn’t fit in command line tools, but sometimes its as much helpful )

I accept GUI has a friendly effect, simplicity of use. But what me miss is that after a few tries the command liners are simpler to use , more productive and damn cool , (particularly when you are showing off )

Pengufest ‘08

suren — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:47:23 +0000

Too much happened during Pengufest ‘08. Lots of fun and lots of kelaas aka damages ! I cannot thank enough all the people who were a part of pengufest and the list is whole of GLUG-T! I really loved working with you guys and it was a wonderful learning experience for me conducting an event of this scale ! Wish I did more justice

If I go into details , this would become a really very big post and so lets just skip all the stuff and all I will say is Pengufest 08 went well!

Dial up in Ubuntu 7.10 – Gutsy Gibbon

suren — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 14:38:34 +0000

WOW ! ! Dial up is working in linux FOR me ! Well this might not be news for many , but yeah its a big one for me ! Without this i had been disconnected for more than one semester hols .
What did i do for making the dial-up work ??
Simple – Installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon ran wvdial – the gnome PPP dialer! it worked just out of the box ! All i had to know was to do was to add
my user name and password for the dial up connection ! sweet isn’t it ??
1. sudo wvdialconf
this generated a wvdial configuration file for connecting to net using ur modem

2. sudo gedit /etc/wvdial.conf
change the username, password and dial up number in that file of my ISP .
3. sudo wvdial
it throws a lot of garbage and then finally obtains few DNS & IP addresses!

Then u can use firefox or any other application to connect to net ! thats all

Now after this , i also installed a gnome application called PPP dialer , which is a GUI for wvdial.

Just a day has passed since i came back home . Already two big things happened ! Hope hols have lots more for me

PS : the other thing is OGRE, which will be in another blog

MGL – Meet GNU Linux 2007

suren — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 20:15:00 +0000

Meet Gnu Linux is a small course which introduces Gnu/Linux to newbiesorganised by thirs years students of Nit trichy to anyone interested in and arund trichy.
After two Successful editions of MGL (as of i know), first one coordinated by Alagu and second one by Hari, this year I am going to coordinate it.
But its really backed upon by a big band of GLUG Trichy members. Lot of work has been going on for that.Check them out here.

Some of the new things we are planning for this year are
1 A book/booklet for the participants – “Introduction to Gnu/linux”
2 A Glug-T distro to be distributed free of cost to all participants.
3 Record the classes and then distribute it.
and lots more.

I am all geared up as i am doing something of this magnitude for the first time and my flair for linux.