Stories from my Life as a Technologist
Just a quick update. All the library facilities pages on the Services portal have been moved to wiki/WordPress for better user experience and consolidated content (we had 3 pages just on copiers & printers before…)
Note: Redirects are in progress… should be done by tomorrow latest.
EDIT: I’ve been reminded/informed that this only works in Windows (or MS-DOS anyway) since it uses .bat files. The suggestion if you’re using other OSs is to use php (but really you can use anything) to automate the command.
I’m sure everyone is familiar with Adobe Acrobat (even if they haven’t actually used it). It’s a nice GUI if you want to edit PDFs, but at least as far as I know, it does not do any batch or automation work. For a digital images project, there’s a lot of automation work that needs to be done and for image to image conversion, I was using Photoshop, but then I started dealing with PDFs. Thus, it was only natural to turn to GhostScript.
PDF to Image
So, I don’t really get any credit for this, because it’s already out there and the variables are well explained. So if you want to turn all the pages of your PDF into images, check out this Danzels Internets post. My case was a little different because I only wanted the first page turned into an image as a thumbnail for an entire file and then for an entire folder. I also prefer to do any image modification (even batch) in an image program.
@echo off
FOR %%Z IN (*.pdf) DO gswin32 -sDEVICE=jpeg -dJPEGQ=95 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dDOINTERPOLATE -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -sOUTPUTFILE=%%Z.jpg -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE %%Z
So, here the major changes are “gswin32” because I use the Windows version, and the “-dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1” so that the first and last page it processes is page 1. You can change the output file name too, so I changed it in such a way that it takes the original file name and adds the .jpg extension.
PDF Merge
This is kind of a side note, because I didn’t need this for my project, but I recently downloaded some articles that for some reason had each section in a separate PDF. So, I get no credit for this one either as I got this one from Real’s How-to on Merging PDFs. I put this in here only for possible improvements of what’s presented on that site.
For the merging of PDFs in a directory, for the [merge.bat], you’re supposed to have this code:
@echo off
gswin32 -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=merged.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf
FOR %%Z IN (*.pdf) DO IF NOT %%Z==1.pdf IF NOT %%Z==merged.pdf IF NOT %%Z==merged2.pdf call merge2.bat %%Z
Maybe it’s clear to other people, but the “1.pdf” is the name of the first pdf. I found that the subsequent ones will be added in alphanumeric order. Also, if you happen not to change the code, it will throw an error and insert a blank page at the beginning.
Apologies for the lack of updates, but although I’ve been fairly busy, there hasn’t been much to report on. I’ve mostly been busy migrating old pages, consulting with others, providing wiki workshops, and preparing for the new portals.
So far, I’ve done a content analysis, much like before, by doing an inventory and looking at what to keep, consulting with various people to see what we might add, and developed an IA for the two based on the inventory and consultation. Things have been a little slow to develop because my co-worker is on vacation, but it’s coming!
We will not be doing pre-design usability testing as we did before (i.e. no card sorts), because we just don’t feel that the two portals in development warrant it. Instead, we’ll be focusing on usability testing after the prototypes are completed. Most likely, it will be a focus group, since they’re not very suitable for task oriented usability testing.
That’s it for now I think, will post some more updates later!
I don’t normally post news items, but I was really excited to hear about the new version of evergreen (here’s the list of new features). I have been taking a library automation course, so I have been learning more about ILS, particularly OpenSource (OS) ones. I didn’t know how many OS systems were available, so I was interested in reading and hearing more. I was a bit disappointed when I heard there was no OS ILS suitable for large libraries, but even if the new version of Evergreen doesn’t quite meet those needs, I’m happy to hear that it’s moving in that direction.
Documentation, tutorials, and user guides must evolve and be updated as technology and software move ahead, but when so many web-based applications use the same basic WYSIWYG, are basic tutorials even needed anymore?
This issue was brought up recently with our wiki’s update to the newest version of MediaWiki. If you use wikipedia at all, you’ve probably been using the new version for quite some time now. One of the greatest improvements for the end-user is the new toolbar.
It covers all your basic formatting needs including tables (which is not the easiest for new users to figure out). The help section is really nice too (since MediaWiki is not a WYSIWYG) showing the user how something will display (of course there’s always the preview button).
After this update, I realized that users will unlikely need as much guidance in editing their wiki pages and the basic tutorials that I created don’t really seem to be needed anymore, or do they? I haven’t exactly polled my users on this issue or anything. For the moment, I have kept it live and updated as it’s being used as a general help article as well. Maybe some users need a bit more structure via a linear method of creating pages, but it would be interesting to know…