She Asked | The Download Munkey

Random Monday : She Asked … How To Combine PDFs

January 07th, 2008

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She was asking me to help merge a collection of single page PDFs into a single PDF. I found pdftk, a set of commandline utilities to manipulate PDFs like joining, splitting or even watermarking PDFs.

Being the lazy monkey that I am, I went to look for a frontend for pdftk so that she could merge the PDFs on her own.

I downloaded PDFTKBuilder, an GPL graphical interface for pdftk which also comes with the current version of pdftk (version 1.41) in a single installer. Installation is a snap and using it is equally simple.

Just choose the files to merge, change the merge order using the Move Up and Move Down buttons, click Save As and all selected PDFs are then combined into a single document.

Here I’m combining Mongoose Publishing’s Battlefield Evolution unit cards into a single PDF.

NOTE: The pages textbox allows you to specify which pages of a PDF to ignore when processing a particular PDF for merging. Handy for those ebooks which comprise several PDFs with an additional cover page for each PDF.

Splitting a PDF with PDFTKBuilder will create a set of single page PDFs using pdftk’s “burst” command so if you’re looking to extract selected pages from a PDF, you might want to use another tool instead.

As a side note, reverse engineers might recognize that Angus Johnson, the creator of PDFTKBuilder, happens to be the guy who programmed the freeware resource editor Resource Hacker

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Random Monday : She Asked … How To Create a Favicon for Blogger

November 04th, 2007

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A brand new series of technical tips over here @ The Download Munkey, based on her requests

She asked for a favicon for her blog hosted on Blogger so here’s the steps if you’re interested in doing the same for your site.

Although the favicon can be of ICO, GIF or PNG format, Internet Explorer 7.0 seems to occassionally have some issues with formats other than ICO so we’ll use ICOs here.

Create a 16×16 ICO file from your image by going to FavIcon from Pics or using your favourite image editor.

Choose an image from your computer and click Generate Favicon.ico to preview and save your favicon.

After previewing, click Download Favicon to get a zip containing your favicon.

Extract the zip file and upload your Favicon.ico to somewhere like Google Pages since Blogger doesn’t allow uploading of ICO files. Remember to rename your file to something like Favicon1.ico or else you’ll end up displaying Google Pages’s favicon instead

Now you’ll need to login to Blogger and edit the Blogger XHTML template under Template > Edit Html. Remember to backup and save your template via Download my Template first!

Search for the <head> tag in your template and insert the following line after it:

where XXX will be the URL of your favicon. The edited template should look something like the screenshot below.