Doc_Babad's Macintosh Tips - A Macintosh Tip or Three… October 2007 Edition By Harry {doc} Babad           © 2007
Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies. The software related tips were tested on a 1 GHz dual processor PowerPC G4 Macintosh with 2 GB DDR SDRAM; running under Macintosh OS X OS X 10.4.10.

This month I continue sharing my occasional tip related finds with you. Some, of the tips I share are things I’ve thought of, used and want to pass on. Where I use any one else’s tips for this column, I acknowledge both their source and their contributors.

 

Oh, I almost forgot! Unless otherwise noted, all the tips and tidbits I share, where appropriate, work on my computer. If I don't own the software but if the tip sounds interesting, I'll so note at the end of that specific write-up.

 

Tips I’ve provided this month, as always in a random order, include:

• Transferring Images between PDFs (Acrobat Tip)
• Downloading/Adding Widgets — Don’t get confused
• Zinio Reader Rejects You Bug
• Reducing the File Size of a PDF — Save it again Sam
• Dealing With Nested Files and Folders — Unnest me, give me a break
• Don’t change that Acrobat Document Name in Midstream

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Transferring Images between PDFs (Acrobat Tip)

There’s a real timesaving process that's terrific for visual people. Rather than extracting, combining, and deleting content between documents through dialogs, you can do it visually using the Pages panel.

Here's how:

 

1. Start with two documents, one to which you want to add pages (the recipient) and the other from which you're taking pages (the donor).
2. In Acrobat Choose [Window> Tile> Horizontally] to display both documents.
3. Click the Pages icon on each document to show the thumbnails.
4. Select the page thumbnails from the donor document's Pages panel and drag them to the recipient document's Pages panel.  You may need to arrange the files you want to reorganize and drag thumbnails to add and remove content.
5. Release the mouse when you are in the right spot and the job is done.
6. Organize and arrange the pages. You can readily display the Pages panel from two, three, or even more documents on the screen and drag pages between the documents.

Adobe Acrobat 8 How-Tos: 125 Essential Techniques

By Donna Baker (Adobe Press)

 

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Downloading/Adding Widgets — Don’t get confuse — There is a difference between downloading a widget and installing it. It’s all in the browser you use.

 

To install widgets you either:

 

1. Download the widget (like any other application) in a non-Safari browser, or with Safari configured to not open "safe" files after downloading. Go to where you downloaded the file in Finder and double-click the widget file.
2. Download the widget with Safari in its default configuration, and the widget will begin to install itself automatically. Doc sez, since you get a dialog box when Safari starts to install the widget, you can stop this process.

 

I do because I don’t like dashboard so I convert each widget I want use to a WidgiApp using Mesa Dynamics’ Amnesty Singles. I store my limited collection of WidgiApps in a folder accessible through the Unsanity.com Fruit Menu Haxie. But that’s enough cross-threaded tip for this item.

 

Anyway back to Widgets: You can see, says Leland, where the confusion may come in. a user who is used to downloading in Safari, where the widget installs itself, fires up Firefox one day and does the same thing. But now, the widget just "lies on the desktop or their download folder.

 

That’s because it was never launched, as it is when Safari handles the job. There's nothing-mysterious going on there, but it is a distinction users would benefit from knowing.

 

If your experience was something other than that of my hypothetical Firefox user (a proxy for everything that falls in item 1 above), please take a minute to check the exact sequence of steps. If it's repeatable, then you've found a bug that should be passed on to Apple.

Leland, Musings from Mars

 

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Zinio Reader Rejects You Bug — Great minds find common solutions

 

For several reasons, I’ve just about given up on any subscriptions through Zinio. First and foremost, it’s difficult, but not impossible to capture part of a downloaded magazine for future reference. When one does capture part of an article it is water marked in an obnoxious manner.  Finally at least every other time I attempt a download (since I updated Macintosh OS X, perhaps past version 10.4.7) it refuses to do so.

 

Solution — I deleted Zinio Reader using CleanApp and reinstalled the reader. This method defacto removes all associated Zinio reader application files, but not the documents downloaded with the reader. In that fashion it mimics Christopher Breen’s solution.

 

 Christopher Breen had a more detailed solution that I quote below.

“If you use the Zinio reader to subscribe to digital versions of magazines, you may find that it refuses to open or download your issues after you transfer your data to a new Mac or restore a hard drive. To fix this, delete the Zinio application and a trio of files located in your user folder/Library/Preferences: ContentGuard, com.zinio.reader.plist, and Zinio.plist.Be sure to empty the Trash after putting the files there. Finally, reinstall Zinio Reader, and the application should once again see you as a valid subscriber.”

 

PS

Oh, the best reason to give up on Zinio is that all but one of my paper magazine subscriptions offers easy free or almost free access to the magazine’s contents. This satisfies my information junkie needs without needing to save paper or scan it; or to put up with Zinio. Only Scientific American still requires a fee for each article you download… shame on them.

Mac 911 – Macworld Sept. 2007

By Christopher Breen

 

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Reducing the File Size of a PDF — Save it again Sam

One of the usual methods for reducing the file size of a PDF document is to limit the versions of Adobe Acrobat or Reader than can open it. I’ve always found this method is unfair to readers who don’t stay current with new updates

 

However Donna Baker, an Acrobat guru, describes a better way. One of the simplest ways to reduce file size is to save a file as itself. If you have been working with a document-for example, adding and removing pages-the file is saved on top of itself each time you save it, and these iterations can really add up to a huge file size. Choose File> Save As. in the Save As dialog, leave the name as is and click Save. A prompt asks if you want to overwrite the file; click Yes. The file is resaved, and content is consolidated. You may be surprised how much smaller the file becomes!

 

Adobe Acrobat 8 How-Tos: 125 Essential Techniques

By Donna Baker (Adobe Press)

 

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Q: I recently found a program called Disk Cleaner (for PCs) and was wondering if there was something similar for Macs. -Gordon Werb

 

A: Disk Cleaner is a free, open source utility that deletes temporary, cache, and cookie files, as well as stray items in the Recycle Bin, from a Windows PC. There are loads of similar utilities for the Mac, but my favorite is Titanium Software’s OnyX (payment requested). It allows you to easily muck with parts of the operating system that are usually accessible only through Terminal. But unlike many tools of this sort, OnyX helps you stay out of trouble while you do so—it clearly explains what its features do and warns of potential problems. For example, in the Cleaning tab, where it seems that you’ll be spending the bulk of your time, you’ll discover that you can delete a wide variety of cache files, as well as form values and cookies (see “Empty the Cache”). OnyX warns you that deleting these things may mean that you have to reenter user names and passwords when you revisit favorite sites (this could cause trouble if you’ve neglected to make a note of any passwords).

 

Mac 911 by Christopher Breen as Reprinted

In the Mid-Columbia Macintosh Users Group Finder September 2007.

 

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Dealing With Nested Files and Folders — Un-nest me, give me a break

 

Q:  I have a folder, which contains many files, and also, many sub-folders. Some of these sub-folders contain sub-subfolders, as well as other files. And so on. Is there any simple application -- or Automator or Terminal sequence -- you might know that will "break open" all these subfolders and sub-subfolders, etc., so that the original folder will contain all, and only, the files within it, with no folder structure within it? Thanks. Al Feldzamen

 

A: Boy, do I. This can be easily done with Automator.

1. Control-click on the Desktop and choose [Automator > New Workflow].
2. In the Untitled window that appears choose Finder from the Library pane. Select the Get Specified Finder Items action and drag it into the Workflows pane.
3. Drag the folder you want to work with into the Get Specified Finder Items action in the Workflow pane to add it.
4. Select the Get Folder Contents action and drag it into the Workflow pane. Enable the Repeat For Each Subfolder Found option.
5. Select the Move Finder Items action and drag it into the Workflow pane. In the Finder create a folder where you’d like to move your files to. From the To pop-up menu choose Other and navigate to the folder you just created.
6. Click the Run button and all the files—even those within subfolders—will be moved into the new folder without their enclosing folders.

Note that these files will be moved rather than copied. When you return to the original folder your files will be gone—only the now-empty enclosing folders remain. The files now reside in the new folder you created.

 

If you want to maintain the original files in their folders as well as have them all in a single folder, use the Copy Finder Items action instead of Move Finder Items.

 

Presuming that you’d simply like to view all the contents of this folder—including all the contents of all the subfolders—you can accomplish this task without moving a single file. Try this:

Create a new Automator workflow that includes these three steps:

1. Get Specified Finder Items This will be the folder full of subfolders.
2. Get Folder Contents (Repeat For Each Subfolder Found) Again, you’re selecting every file within the folder and its subfolders.
3. Add Spotlight Comments to Finder Items You’re applying a tag to each file. Enter Swordfish for all I care.

Now, return to the Finder and choose File > New Smart Folder. In the New Smart Folder window choose Other from the first pop-up menu (the one that currently reads Kind). From the sheet that appears, choose Spotlight Comment and click OK. Make the first condition read Spotlight Comment Contains Swordfish (or whatever you’ve tagged your files with).

Your smart folder now contains entries for all the files within the main enclosing folder, organized by document type. Save and name the smart folder.

Reprinted from a response to a macCompanion Help Question

Answer By Christopher Breen, Mac 911

 

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Don’t change that Acrobat Document Name in Midstream

 

I’ve noticed that in some applications changing the document name while the document is open can causes a bit of a problem. Applications in question include Acrobat files and at times MS Word, and GraphicConverter [GC] 5.x. Files The effect is random for GC 6.x files, which I just installed.

For me, using the Fugitsu high speed document scanner (May 2007 macC) this is a real problem To smooth sequential scanning the scanner and associated software (read Iris 11 for Fugitsu) gives each new document a customized name I designated, in this case one based on date and time. [E.g., 2007_04_16_12_37_16.pdf] Then I renamed the document NAS Tank Waste Study Summary to meet my filing needs.

 

And the screen shots were grand, gnash — gnash

 

I changed the name back to the misspelled original and all was fine. Why couldn’t I, I tried, I save as the document: I don’t know, it sometimes works but mostly does not.

 

Harry {doc} Babad

macCompanion.com

 

That’s all folks… Harry {doc} Babad