Driving to work over an alternative road with nice views of flowery fields, small towns and lined with lots of trees filtering the warm sun overhead, I almost felt like I was going on vacation. I can't say that I dislike that sensation ;)
Location: Work
Today is a beautiful day. It's warm and sunny, the woman are pretty in their summer clothes and statistics class only tool 23 minutes. Hell, even the grad student giving the practical was pretty.
After that, I spent about an hour trying to get on the campusnet with my N810, only to find out there's a bug in the proprietary wifi driver/stack from Nokia that causes my username/password to come through scrambled...
I saw Herbie on the highway from my metro today.
Also, I admire the way two girls behaved in the crowded metro. They both where quite heavily burned (as in "from a fire"), both in their faces and on their limbs, but they wore nice summer clothes nonetheless. Really too bad to have your skin and beauty destroyed that way; one even missed most of her fingers on her left hand, still steadying herself with it against the rocking of the train. They made quite an impression on me. I even thought I knew one of them; it's a weird world...
Location: Home
I just wanted to take a moment to thank the very lovely Eilla for the very nice birthday greetz as well as the wonderful plug for the new podcast. It’s always nice to know you have such great friends on the other side of the planet 
Thanks again, Eilla Hope you’re getting some sleep (finally!)
Been rather busy with a number of projects for clients these last few weeks, but now that quite a few of them have been launched I can sit back and focus on some interesting side-projects.
For two projects I've written a PDF report generator that uses a combination of dompdf and pdftk to output very nice CSS-styled reports from generated HTML. Dompdf is quite nice, even though it does take its time to do more complex HTML-to-PDF conversions. Pdftk is used as dompdf can't handle more than a few pages at a time, it seems (lots of OOM issues).
A rather annoying problem however is that pdftk, when concatenating PDF files, doesn't remove duplicate embedded font objects. This isn't an issue when you're talking about a couple of pages, but these reports can easily get to 50+ pages due to a multitude of fonts easily hit the 10MB mark.
Instead of hacking dompdf or pdftk, I instead wrote a small pdf-fontfilter script (you can find it on my projects-page) in python to remove the duplicate font-objects from the PDF. Using this small script, those 10MB PDF files are easily reduced to about 700KB, without any further modifications and with the same visual result.
Although using the Adobe PDF reference manual made things a lot easier, it is plain that PDF is a document format that stems from a couple of decades ago. PDF files are generated to be as efficient as possible for the reader to parse, but this does make it more interesting for those wanting to generate or modify PDF files. Especially the cross-reference section at the end of every PDF document shows this.
Another interesting tidbit: xpdf happily works with badly-formatted PDF files that Adobe Reader chokes on. With all the bloat in Adobe Reader, you'd think that they would be able to do their best to fix broken PDF documents...
The late night gremlins have struck again…
…the first NO CARRIER podcast is now available for your tasting. We hope you enjoy it. We know it’s missing some fancy opening/close theme music, we’re working on that.
You may listen to the podcast over here:
http://galaxycow.com/podcasts/no_carrier/
…or, if you prefer, subscribe to the feed via:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NoCarrier
We’ve submitted the podcast to the iTunes directory, so hopefully that will come about soon.
Enjoy!
Last updated:
May 09, 2008 11:45 PM
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