Calliope Sounds: August 2014

Quick guide to making PDFs with text outlines from HTML

Create the HTML document.

<html>
<body style="margin: 0; padding: 0">
<div style="width: 2in; height: 2in; border: 1pt solid blue;”>
<span style="font-size: 0.5in">Hel</span>lo
</div>
</body>
</html>

Use the OS X command line tool wkhtmltopdf to convert the document to pdf

wkhtmltopdf -B 0 -T 0 -L 0 -R 0 --page-width 2in --page-height 2in box.html box.pdf

The fonts in this are embedded (or likely to be). To replace the fonts with text outlines use

gs -sDEVICE=ps2write -dNOCACHE -sOutputFile=- -q -dbatch -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET box.pdf -c quit | ps2pdf - box-nofont.pdf

Done.

I'm going to miss that man.

Response to Tom Hoffman's "Peter Greene on Tenure"

Response to "The threat of firing is the great 'Do this or else...'" in Tom Hoffman's Peter Greene on Tenure:

On the whole I find that teachers take on too much accountability and the administration too little. To some degree this is self imposed. I don't know of any other profession that has such a shallow managerial hierarchy. The whole point of a manager is to make this kind of crap go away -- if not in actuality then at least from visibility. Tenure is not the solution and, understandably, sets up teachers for further criticism as being detached from appropriate accountability and economics of their employment. Teaching needs to add management and remove tenure.

Inner curmudgeon awoken

My inner curmudgeon was awoken this morning when I read of yet another OS X application for note taking with cloud storage and a corresponding web application. Doesn't anyone know how to use a text editor in conjunction with a remote file service like Google Drive, et al? And, for the vast majority of users, there is no purchase price or recurring fees.