In Your Face

An 'in your face' to all the Windoze Box users! I'll tell you why my GNU/Linux box is better...

We have a huge syllabus, and we get a lot of class notes. I earlier used to photocopy the notes from others, which used up a lot of my allowances. It would have been welcome if I had studied from them. So spending huge sums of money on something I won't be using so much is, well, a Waste!

So came up the concept of scanning/taking pictures of the classnotes into a bunch of JPEG files. Its difficult to study from the JPEGs because the continuity is somewhat lost (assuming I am studying from the notes)

So here is what I need to do. Convert a bunch of JPEGs to a single PDF.

Last sem what I did is I copied the pics one after another to a ODT file on OpenOffice.org(that's the GNU/Linux alternative for MS Word), and then I convert it to PDF.

But that was too tedious...

(ODT/DOC to PDF is easier. Just open it using OpenOffice.org amd use the "Export to PDF" option in file menu. Its fast!)

Today I found an awesome tool called ImageMagick(well not technically today, I have used it earlier when I created graphs on my Ruby on Rails app [The Free Market] ).

I installed ImageMagick (its free) into my Mandriva box by doing a simple

urpmi imagemagick

as root user.

Other distro users can substitute urpmi with apt-get/yum install/zypper install or whatever package manager you use.

Then I used command line to move into the folder where I had the JPEGs ( cd path/to/images ) and here is how I converted my images to pdf. Wait for it.... wait for it... ok, here goes..

convert *.jpg sanyal.pdf

Beat that Windoze users!!!