Textmode

A little off the main topic, but since this is a personal blog about foobar, I guess this doesn’t matter.

I bought a a Garmin GPSMap 60csx and I really like it.

I did a first test in the near mountains, yesterday, and I’m really impressed with the functionality.

The basic features are:

• 2.2” x 1.5” color (256) LCD, 240×160 pixels
• microSD memory card support (I’ve got a 2GB card)
• 1000 waypoints and 50 routes
• unlimited (on sd card) support for custom POI (Points of Interest)
• Automatic track log (up to 10,000 points and 20 tracks, and TrackBack lets you reverse tracks to navigate back to your starting point)
• Trip computer
• Provides DGPS accuracy within three meters
• electronic compass
• barometric altimeter
• area calculation
• geocaching mode and oudoor GPS games
• Waterproof

and much more

I’m playing around with it and collecting information about using it under linux (and VirtualBox) if you’re interested, stay tuned – I’ll post it in the next days.

Right now there seems to be a bug in evince, that doesn’t allow the correct printing of multiple pages per sheet in evince.

I have a PDF containing single sites in landscape format.

The result I expected are sheets like this:

1…3

2…4

However, the result I’m getting, however I mix parameters is:

2…4

1…3

Solution

I used two handy little tools to solve this, the first thing I had to do is merge some single PDF Documents, then create a PDF with multiple pages per sheet.

PDFtk

From the man page:

.bq If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing every‐day things with PDF documents.

PDFtk helps us with the following features:

• Merge PDF Documents
• Split PDF Pages into a New Document
• Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
• Encrypt Output as Desired
• Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
• Apply a Background Watermark
• Report on PDF Metrics such as Metadata, Bookmarks, and Page Labels
• Update PDF Metadata
• Attach Files to PDF Pages or the PDF Document
• Unpack PDF Attachments
• Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
• Uncompress and Re-Compress Page Streams
• Repair Corrupted PDF (Where Possible)

PDFJam

PDFJam is a collection of scripts:

• pdfnup puts multiple document pages together on one physical page at a reduced size
• pdfjoin concatenate multiple PDFs
• pdf90 rotate PDF pages

Solution

As you can see, to merge PDFs you can either use PDFtk or pdfjoin. Here is the PDFtk way:

pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf

To get a PDF with multiple pages per physical page, we use pdfnup like this:

pdfnup --nup 2x2 --column true joined.pdf