The gconf-editor provides more configuration options than are otherwise apparent, in particular the option for the position of the tab bar (located under UI).

I've started writing really complicated style files for my TeX documents. Here are a few useful hints that I've come across and feel that I need to write down else I'll forget them.

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Here are a load of things that I often want to look up when using the xy.sty LaTeX package.

• Centring the label on the arrow: the - in \ar[r]^-{f}
• Invisible arrow: the @{} in \ar@{}[r]|{f} (the | puts the label in the middle of the arrow rather than above or below it).

Resizing postscript files.

Use pstops. For example the following command doubles-up the postscript file, removing blank space:

pstops -p a4 "2:0@.9L(24cm,-2cm)+1@.9L(24cm,12.85cm)" original.ps new.ps

This one uses psnup to put the slides printed by beamer four to a sheet.

psnup -pa4 -W363 -H273 -4 -d5 -m10 -b5 -c algobj.handout.ps > algobj.handout_nup.ps

Merge PDFs with ghostscript

This took me absolutely ages to find out about. I'd been trying all sorts of silly things, almost including trying to edit the PDFs directly!

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=merged.pdf \
source1.pdf source2.pdf source3.pdf etc.pdf

Some things that I keep having to look up about the Z-shell.

• Argument modification

  mod	result
  :h	remove last component of pathname
  :t	remove all leading components
  :r	remove extension
  :e	remove all but extension
  :u	uppercase first letter
  :l	lowercase first letter
  :s/l/r/	substitute l by r (& in r is replaced by l)
  :&	repeat last substitution
  :g	apply modifier once to each word
  :a	apply modifier as much as possible
  :p	print line but do not execute