WD5GNR rambles about microcontrollers, ham radio, electronics, the Internet, science fiction, and other oddball things.   Archives << current   Welcome Well, as if I don't have enough stuff on the Web, I've decided to post an electronics-oriented "blog" to replace the defunct Al's Electronic Workshop program. What can you expect? Who knows? My random thoughts and finds on electronics, microcontrollers, ham radio, the Internet, and who knows what else? I've been blogging for awhile since the magazine I used to work for (New Architect) has a blog (the "daily") that I wrote to (along with the other editors). Where else am I on the Web? Programming and consulting Electronics Ham Radio and PIC/CPLD/FPGA Tutorial.

Al Williams WD5GNR Rambles   Sunday, September 15   Goodbye Seiko S7600 I noticed that Seiko is dropping its S7600 TCP/IP stack on a chip. Have a look at what you missed! 12:40 Friday, September 6   PDF For a long time I've used GhostScript to produce PDF files. It works, but you have to be a techno geek to get it to work. Worse still, if you want features like bookmarks, you have to be a super techno geek. I recently ran across a free tool at http://www.pdf995.com that is pretty clever. This guy has three shell programs that work together and with GhostScript (which is included). The first one sets up a printer driver so you can print to a PDF file (I've done that for years with REDMON). However, the second program can post process the output file to add watermarks, bookmarks, links, and other features. The third program can encrypt and sign PDFs (I wasn't impressed with this one -- I use PGP, GPG, and/or S/Mime to do that). These programs are free -- the catch is that they pop up an ad in your browser when you use them (but the PDFs have no ads or changes). The 995 part is that you can buy a key to turn of the ads for $9.95 each or get all 3 programs for about $20. A fair price for a nice piece of work. The program isn't perfect. For example, when entering bookmarks there is no way to edit or delete them. You also can't save them for later. Here's a tip though. If you look in the pdf995 directory you'll find the file it works on is temp.ps. You can easily identify the bookmarks there and change or delete them. You can even copy them to another file for saving. If you know how to put pdfmarks in a PS document you can do that here too. For example, I set the PDF options to automatically start with bookmarks visible. When you are ready to recreate the PDF, just run the res/995.bat file and your changes will take effect! If you want to learn about pdfmark, have a look at the sample chapter at: http://www.pdflib.com/pdfmark/index.html -- good stuff. 07:48