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

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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).
• Shifting an arrow: the @<> in \ar@<1ex>[dr]

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

Mac OS X boot keys. Hold down as soon as possible after hearing the start-up noise and don't let go until something different happens.

The ⌘ symbol is ⌘ and ⌥ is ⌥. Actually, looking at my ⌨ (keyboard), ⌥ is now just alt.