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!!!
