A4-sized PDFs—particularly technical papers and academic documents—render poorly on Kindle devices. The small fonts become nearly unreadable, and Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” feature often destroys formatting in the process. You need a tool designed specifically for this workflow. Why Standard Conversion Fails Amazon’s email-to-Kindle conversion assumes reflowable text content. Technical papers with multi-column layouts, equations,…
Gnuplot can output directly to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) format, which is useful for including plots in LaTeX documents and other publishing workflows. Direct EPS Output The simplest approach is to set the terminal to postscript with the eps option before plotting: set terminal postscript eps enhanced mono “Helvetica” 14 set output “my-plot.eps” plot sin(x) This…
Several tools can convert .doc and .docx files to PDF from the command line. Here’s what works in practice. LibreOffice (most common approach) The standard command is: libreoffice –headless –convert-to pdf –outdir /path/to/output/ /path/to/file.docx This works well on systems with X11 available. However, on truly headless servers, –headless doesn’t fully suppress X11 requirements—LibreOffice will still…
When you need to rsync against hosts behind NAT gateways or port-forwarded SSH services, the standard port 22 won’t work. The solution is the -e flag, which lets you specify a custom SSH command with your desired port. Basic usage Use -e to pass custom SSH arguments: rsync -avxP –delete -e “ssh -p 13022” username@example.com:/remote/path/…
When your OCaml program crashes with Fatal error: Exception “Stack_overflow” but doesn’t tell you where the problem originated, you need to enable backtrace reporting. The process is straightforward but requires recompilation. Enable Debug Symbols and Backtraces First, recompile your program with the -g flag to include debug information: ocamlopt -g -o myprogram myprogram.ml If you’re…
sbt (Scala Build Tool) isn’t available in the default Fedora repositories, though Scala itself is. Here’s how to install it properly. Using the Official Repository The most reliable approach is to add sbt’s official repository to your system. This gives you automatic updates and avoids manual RPM downloads. Create the repository configuration file: sudo tee…
Trailing spaces and tabs at the end of lines are common annoyances in source code and configuration files. They’re invisible, waste space, and can cause issues with certain tools or version control systems. Here’s how to remove them efficiently. Using sed The most straightforward approach with sed: sed ‘s/[[:space:]]*$//’ your_file > your_file.tmp && mv your_file.tmp…
utop is an improved OCaml REPL with line editing, history, context-sensitive completion, and syntax highlighting. While powerful, its key bindings differ from standard GNU readline, which can be jarring if you’re used to standard shell behavior. Getting the key bindings list The simplest way to see all available bindings is to run the #utop_bindings directive…
When you need to page through error output from a command, you’ll run into the issue that less only receives stdout by default. Error messages go to stderr (file descriptor 2), so they’ll still scroll past on your terminal while stdout gets paged. Basic approach: combine stderr with stdout make 2>&1 | less The 2>&1…
Designated initializers for aggregate types with non-trivial members (like std::vector) have inconsistent support across GCC versions. This error typically appears when you try to initialize a struct containing standard library containers using designated initializer syntax in the wrong order. The Problem When you compile this code with older GCC versions: struct Stat { vector<int> vec;…
Accessing Linux filesystems from Windows is useful when dual-booting, migrating data, or recovering files. Read-only access is essential to prevent accidental corruption of ext4 metadata and data. Why Read-Only Access Matters Ext4 is designed for Linux environments. Windows drivers lack complete understanding of ext4 journaling, extended attributes, and other advanced features. Writing through an incomplete…
Installing WordPress in a subdirectory keeps your site root cleaner and makes it easier to manage core files separately from content. Here’s how to configure WordPress so the admin and core files live in /wordpress while the site appears at your domain root. Creating the Subdirectory Structure First, create the WordPress directory and set proper…
WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme shows full post content on archive pages by default. Using excerpts instead keeps archive pages clean and improves page load speed by showing just a summary of each post. Enable Excerpts on Archive Pages Add this to your theme’s functions.php or a custom plugin: function twentythirteen_excerpts_on_archives($content) { if (is_archive() || is_home())…
You’re seeing fatal errors because PHP has hit its default resource constraints: PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted These limits exist to prevent runaway scripts from consuming server resources. Here’s how to increase them. Via php.ini (Global Configuration) The most reliable…
HP printers work well on Fedora when you install the right packages and drivers. Here’s what you need to do to get a USB or network-connected HP printer working reliably. Install HPLIP and Related Packages Start by installing the HP Linux Imaging and Printing (HPLIP) suite: sudo dnf install hplip hplip-gui hpijs On modern Fedora…
Several native options now exist for annotating PDFs directly on Linux, though each has trade-offs between features and ease of use. Native Linux Tools Okular is the most straightforward choice for basic annotations. It’s lightweight, fast, and saves markups directly into the PDF: sudo apt install okular okular document.pdf Okular supports highlighting, underlining, strikethrough, freehand…
If gnuplot or ps2epsi fails to run or produces excessive warnings on modern Fedora systems, you’re likely hitting a fontconfig deprecation issue. The symptom is repeated warnings like: Fontconfig warning: “/etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf”, line 14: reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated. This happens because /etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf still includes a deprecated reference to ~/.fonts.conf. While the warning alone doesn’t…
Scala runs on the JVM and combines object-oriented and functional programming. Here’s how to install Scala on Fedora Linux using several methods. Method 1: Install via Coursier (Recommended) Coursier is the official Scala installer and handles JDK dependencies automatically: # Install Coursier curl -fL https://github.com/coursier/coursier/releases/latest/download/cs-x86_64-pc-linux.gz | gzip -d > cs && chmod +x cs &&…
You’ll sometimes need to exclude specific repositories from package operations—typically when multiple repos provide the same package, mirror connectivity is unreliable, or you want to force installation from a trusted source. The –disablerepo flag lets you skip repos on a per-command basis. Basic syntax dnf –disablerepo=repoid1 –disablerepo=repoid2 install package-name Add –disablerepo once for each repo…
When your distro’s package repositories lag behind, installing Scala directly from the official release is straightforward. This approach works on any Linux system with Java already installed. Prerequisites You’ll need a JDK installed. On most systems: # Debian/Ubuntu apt install default-jdk # RHEL/Fedora/CentOS dnf install java-17-openjdk-devel # Alpine apk add openjdk17 Verify your Java installation:…