Arrigo's Hints and Tricks Page

• Annoyed with the Korn Shell under OSS on your Tandem/Himalaya/NonStop system?
  Well, the trick is to use "set -o emacs" and you will get an Emacs-like keymap.
• Want TeX to deal well with both pdflatex and latex and have hyperref available?
  You want this in your class file...
  

  \newif\ifpdf
  \ifx\pdfoutput\undefined
    \pdffalse
  \else
    \pdfoutput=1
    \pdftrue
  \fi
  \ifpdf 
    \usepackage[pdftex,
     pdfpagemode={UseOutlines},bookmarks=true,bookmarksopen=true,
     bookmarksopenlevel=0,bookmarksnumbered=true,hypertexnames=false,
     colorlinks,linkcolor={blue},citecolor={blue},urlcolor={red},
     pdfstartview={FitV}]{hyperref}
     \pdfcompresslevel=9
  \else  
     \usepackage{hyperref}
  \fi
  

  Then each time you want differing behaviour you simply use \ifpdf.
  The reason you need this is that you cannot just check for \pdfoutput as this is set by packages
  like graphicx even when PDF is not to be used.
• How to stick a "draft" banner diagonally across the page in TeX (note: Postscript printer/output only):

  %%
  %%      Puts a nice "DRAFT" across the page in light grey
  %%
  \special{!userdict begin /bop-hook{gsave 200 30 translate
         65 rotate /Times-Roman findfont 216 scalefont setfont
         0 0 moveto 0.7 setgray (DRAFT) show grestore}def end}
  

  This is old stuff, I was using it for my 3rd Year Project!
• pdfTeX no longer supports PDF encryption by default and I have not been able to get PDFTrans to work as I want it to.
  So I wrote a PDF encryption wrapper to the iText Java class library.
  It is very simple, does nothing fancy and, unlike PDFTrans, it does not remove the metadata which pdfTeX places in the PDF file.
• Want to create totally random IP traffic, ie. where even the IP header is random?
  Try iploonie.c which creates a valid Ethernet header and then random junk.
  The output is in tcpdump format, you can play it on a wire with tcpreplay.
  (Example output as replayed by tcpdump looks fun!) [Note: licensed under the GPL]
• My SiS motherboard's Ethernet card doesn't come up happy with OpenBSD.
  So I wrote a little script after much experimenting that makes it work.
  Here is sis0kick.
• Want to mount your OpenBSD /usr/src onto a disk-space challenged system read-only?
  It is not as obvious as it seems so I wrote a small "how to".

Last modified 27/04/2005