Using epilogue.ps to set default Inital View settings in PDFs created with Adobe printer / Distiller

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I’m using the Adobe printer or Distiller to create PDF documents. While you can set most PDF settings in the .joboptions file, there are a few things that I want that are not available:

  • I like the Initial View of the PDF to be
    • Page layout: Single Page
    • Magnification: Fit Page
      pdf_initial_view

To do that, I need to go open every PDF in Adobe Acrobat, and select File > Properties to change it. A very time-consuming, cumbersome task if you need to do that for a lot of files.
After a lot of googl’ing and trial-and-error, I finally managed to automate this by using pdfmark additions. pdfmarks are extensions to Postscript. These can be added to PDFs by adding them to the epilogue.ps file in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe PDF\Distiller\Data and then creating a custom joboptions file that uses the updated epilogue.ps file (the default settings will not use the epilogue.ps file).

Setup

  1. Open %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe PDF\Distiller\Data\epilogue.ps in a text editor
  2. After the line “‘% Insert your custom PostScript here”, add 
    [ /PageMode /UseNone /Page 1 /View [/Fit ] /DOCVIEW pdfmark
[ {Catalog} << /PageLayout /SinglePage >> /PUT pdfmark
  3. Save the epilogue.ps file
  4. Launch Distiller, select a joboption you want to use
  5. In Distiller, select Settings > Edit Adobe PDF Settings…
  6. Select Advanced, check “Use Prologue.ps and Epilogue.ps” option:
    distiller_advanced_epilogue
  7. Save As… to save the edited job option as a new one.
  8. In Windows, go to the Devices and Printers View, right-click the Adobe PDF printer and select Printer properties.
  9. Click Preferences… and select the .joboptions file as Default Settings:
    printer_preferences
  10. (Optional) Uncheck Delete log files for successful jobs if you want to look at the log file. It took me a while to find it, but on my Windows 10 machine, it was located at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Adobe\Acrobat\Distiller 2015\messages.log

I found the initial information about pdfmark in this blog post. The link to the pdfmark Reference document no longer works, but you can find the pdfmark Reference on the Adobe Devnet site.

Using JSConsole to debug an javascript issue on an iPad

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Yesterday I ran into an issue with one of the websites I’m developing. All of a sudden, some pages would not show correctly on an iPad. However, as Safari on the iPad doesn’t provide “developer tools”, it was nearly impossible to determine what went wrong. The pages were working fine on other devices, including a normal laptop and an Android phone. Also Chrome’s emulation mode did not show any problems.

Digging into the Settings on the iPad, I found the “Web Inspector” option in the Advanced Settings tab for Safari. It states “To use the Web Inspector, connect to Safari on your computer using a cable and access your iPad from the Develop menu.” That’s fine if you have a Mac computer, but I only have Windows PC’s…

Luckily, after some Googling, this website from Leon Atherton came to the rescue. While it covers Remote Debugging on OS X, it also provides information about a cool web app called JSConsole. You simply need to add a script tag into your web page and that will capture any console.log input.

jsconsole

Pretty neat.

PS. The issue was linked to the use of arrow functions in one of my javascript pages. Those are not supported in Safari. And not in IE either, apparently. Which is a pity as they made a piece of code where I used the every() method a bit more compact. So I instead of

var emptystack = filestack.every(s => s === undefined);

I now have to use:

function isUndefined(element) {
return ( element === undefined );
}
var emptystack = filestack.every(isUndefined);

Oh well…

 

PHP function to convert only words in UPPERCASE to Startcase

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I needed a function in PHP that would convert words in uppercase to Startcase, i.e. the first letter of the word in uppercase and the rest in lowercase. A combination of ucwords with strtolower can do that, however, I only wanted the words that were fully in uppercase to be converted, not the other words.

To give a example, I wanted
SHINKANSEN SAKURA 555 naar Hiroshima (treinpas valideren in Shinagawa station)
to be converted to
Shinkansen Sakura 555 naar Hiroshima (treinpas valideren in Shinagawa station)
(and not to)
Shinkansen Sakura 555 Naar Hiroshima (treinpas Valideren In Shinagawa Station)

You can do that relatively easily with preg_replace_callback:

function uc_uppercase_words($string) {
  $result = preg_replace_callback(
    '|\b[A-Z]{2,}\b|',
    function ($matches) {
      return ucwords(strtolower($matches[0]));
    },$string);
  return $result;
}

This replaces any word of least 2 capital letters to a word with only the first letter capitalized.