Illustrator, EPS and LaTeX

Ironically, Adobe Illustrator creates malformed files when you save your illustrations as EPS, and of course LaTeX, ghostscript and thus pdflatex choke on them. There’s however a simple remedy: the eps2eps “distiller” strips all non-essential parts away from EPS files thus fixing also malformed AI EPS files.

For reference, here’s the gist of my (unoptimized) eps2pdf script I use before I run pdflatex:

#!/bin/bash
mkdir temp-eps-eps
for file in *.eps; do
    echo -e "$file";
    eps2eps $file temp-eps-eps/$file;
    cd temp-eps-eps;
    epstopdf $file --outfile=`echo -e $file | sed -e "s/\.eps/\.pdf/g"`;
    mv `echo -e $file | sed -e "s/\.eps/\.pdf/g"` ..;
    rm $file;
    cd ..;
done
rmdir temp-eps-eps

This should be called in the directory whose EPS files you wish to convert to PDF.

And why do I use EPS? Pretty much any vector graphics application supports it. Pretty often, saving your illustrations directly as well-behaving PDFs can be much more difficult than using EPS.

N2S: Rebuilding VirtualBox Kernel Module

This needs to be done whenever a new kernel is installed. (Sometimes a newer version of VBox is needed as well, if the current one does not support the new kernel.)

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Quickly Convert Text Encodings

Just run:

iconv -f from -t to < input > output

where for example from=ISO88591 and to=UTF8

An Excellent Guide to Getting PulseAudio to Work in Fedora 8

This guide saved my day: Pulseaudio Fedora 8 Howto. Now I can play MIDI music with TiMidity++ and sounds at the same time, which is good for playing DOS games

A Quick Way to Create an ISO Image

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image.iso