Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category

Using Google Voice and Gizmo Project Together

Saturday, August 1st, 2009

See update below (skip to update)

Google Voice, the Google-ized incarnation of GrandCentral, is a fantastic service that aims to become your virtual phone switchboard. It gives you a free phone number that can receive regular phone calls and route them to any other actual phones you have connected to your account. Powerful stuff.

Unfortunately, though, its forwarding abilities are limited to US phones. Using some VoIP magic, though, you can create a semblance of international forwarding and get free (or nearly free) phone calls to the US while abroad. If you’re not in a foreign country, you can harness the same VoIP magic to get a nearly free phone service. (more…)

Installing pdftk-php

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Upon popular request, I’ve decided to update the original tutorial for populating a LiveCycle PDF with PHP to apply to the new release of pdftk-php. The installation instructions should be mostly clear in the readme and in the inline comments in the example included with the script; this post is merely supplemental. (more…)

Converting a Blogger Blog to InDesign Tagged Text with Perl

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

Our family has a fairly sizable blog that we (actually, mostly my wife, Nancy) have kept updated for several years. Since it contains so much family history we wanted an easy way to preserve it in print form, just in case Blogger gets the boot from Google some day (not that that will ever really happen…). (more…)

Typing transliterated Arabic quickly

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

Since Arabic doesn’t use the Latin alphabet, and lots of the letters don’t have Latin equivalents (خ, ع, ق, ط, for example), transliteration is necessary to show Arabic words and sounds in English writing. There is an easy way to type transliterated Arabic quickly, though, using macros to locate hidden Unicode characters used by many of the standard transliteration systems. (more…)

Populating a LiveCycle PDF with PHP and MySQL

Saturday, October 6th, 2007

This tutorial is officially defunct. It is only here for archival purposes. The main script has been consolidated into one PHP class—pdftk-php. Please see the updated tutorial.

I work in the Harold B. Lee Library Multimedia Lab where we check out digital video and still cameras, tripods, external hard drives, digital voice recorders, and let people use $8,000 Quad Core Intel Macs. Expensive stuff… (more…)

Using Arabic in InDesign without InDesign ME

Monday, September 17th, 2007

About a year ago I discovered to my dismay that using Arabic in InDesign was entirely impossible. (more…)