You can imagine where it goes from here.

Every once in awhile I come across a feature of a piece of software, generally, a small utility that I hadn’t known about and that shows immediate value.  Today Jon showed me the --color flag for GNU grep.  It uses color to highlight the term you were searching for in the line returned.  For example:

# grep –color=auto -i metadata todo.txt
Metadata Functions to Move:
   MetadataView…Make sure only our indexed items are passed up.

Its a very simple thing, but one of those that I’m surpised I haven’t been using.  I know have a shell aliases for that.  See the grep documentation for more information.

[Update 6/2: linux.com has a great article on GNU grep's new features which talks about the color.  One that I'm particularly expected about is the ability to use Perl-style regular expressions.]

I often like to print out many web pages to read on the train.  To not waste paper I like to print them 2 up and double sided.  If the printer supports it, I also like to staple the pages.  On Linux, I use Firefox to print to postscript, then used a2ps to have the PS files combined, 2-uped, and short-side duplexed.  I’d then manually staple it, as there was no good way to tell the print center at work to staple it.  I’d use a command line similar to this:

a2ps -Eps -Afill -stumble 1.ps 2.ps 3.ps 4.ps

I tried this approach under OS X, but the problem is that the postscript that is generated on OS X is so detailed that it takes forever to process to print out, on the order of 2 minutes of processing per article.  Since PDF is the spooling format for printing in OS X (coming soon to linux) I thought I’d look to see if there was an easy way to concatinate PDF files so I could then have the regular printing interface (via Preview) handle the 2-up, double-sided, stapling goodness.

After much searching around I found this article and later this web page.  Combining a bit from both, I came up with following that works really well in my few days of testing.

texexec --pdf --paper=letter --pdfarrange --result all.pdf 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf 4.pdf

It runs really quickly (especially in comparison to the a2ps method) and then I just open all.pdf and print from there.  It requires that you have teTeX installed.  On both Linux and OS X I had this installed as part of the prerequesets for docbook and doxygen.