Monthly Archives: November 2011

Viewing print PDFs properly

To view a print-ready PDF properly, there are some settings to switch on in Acrobat or Adobe Reader. They’re off by default, for some reason. Show trim area Traditionally, PDFs (and before that, film) are output with crop marks embedded. … Continue reading

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Reduce the amount of inactive memory to increase free memory

When memory is no longer needed by an application/program/process, Mac OS X may still keep the data so that if you need it again, it’s already there. This is the ‘inactive memory’ in Activity Monitor. If you do some new … Continue reading

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Starting Mac applications with arguments

In most cases a program can be started from the icon and all is fine. Sometimes, the program offers extra functionality if you hold down Alt/Option when opening – iTunes, for example, lets you change your music library. Occasionally a … Continue reading

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PDF printer in Mac OS X

.If a Mac application uses the standard Print dialog box, as virtually everything does, then a PDF can easily be made with the PDF menu button. If specific PDF settings are required, the document can be saved as PostScript then … Continue reading

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Pass arguments to Automator or AppleScript workflows from the command line

AppleScript osascript test.scpt a=3 b where test.scpt is on run argv set a to item 1 of argv return “First argument (a=3) is ” & a end run Note that AppleScripts run by osascript send their output back to the … Continue reading

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