PDFTK – The PDF Toolkit

PDFTK – The PDF Toolkit

I have long been a keen user of pdftk, the PDF Toolkit, but am frequently surprised when people have not heard of it. True, it is a command line tool, but it is easy to incorporate into service menus, scripts etc and doubtless there is a GUI front-end for it somewhere (in fact there is one linked to from the above page).

Clearly a blog post is called for, but, whilst you wait for a post that will never arrive, here is a link to some examples that should open your eyes to what is possible with pdftk.

To get started on a Debian-based system:

$ sudo apt-get install pdftk
$ man pdftk

Enjoy.

Crontab header

Very early on in my Linux life, I came across this suggested header for crontab and I’ve used it ever since. So much so that I am always slightly thrown when I come across a crontab without it! No, you don’t need it, yes the standard commented header works just fine, but, if like me you prefer things neatly lined up, then this might suit you:

Linux Terminal Command Reference

I thought that this Linux Terminal Command Reference from the Mint community was excellent. Having learned them piecemeal over many years, I was almost resentful to see them all listed together. Linux shouldn’t be easy, it should be knowledge painfully acquired through years of humiliation on IRC channels and mailing lists!

IRSSI Spellchecking

Having migrated servers, my irssi tab-complete spell-check facility had broken; so I decided to document the process of getting it working.

Firstly install the required packages:

$ sudo apt-get install aspell-en libaspell-dev aspell libtext-aspell-perl

Secondly, create your user’s script folder, if not already present:

$ mkdir -p ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun

Now, download the aspell script:

$ cd ~/.irssi/scripts
$ wget http://scripts.irssi.org/scripts/aspell_complete.pl
$ cd autorun
$ ln -s ../aspell_complete.pl

Lastly, either restart IRSSI, or, in type:

/script load ~/.irssi/scripts/autorun/aspell_complete.pl

Default Applications Launched from Terminal

For some time it has irritated me that launching URLs from my terminal would always launch Iceweasel/Firefox, rather than my default browser Chromium. If you’re running KDE or Gnome, then I accept that this would be governed from somewhere in the desktop environment’s control panel or settings, but I run PekWM, and assumed that setting the default browser in update-alternatives should be enough:

# update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

Unfortunately of course many of the applications that I am using are native to KDE or Gnome and probably are still respecting their environment’s settings. In the end it was simply a case of editing:

~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list

And adding the following lines:

x-scheme-handler/http=chromium.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=chromium.desktop

Now opening links from my terminal is correctly opening a new tab in Chromium, or running Chromium if it isn’t already.

Joy.