Increase / Decrease margins in PDF

Increasing or decreasing margins in PDF is what most of us need to do, specially when printing journals/letters etc on A4 sheets, or vice-versa . I tried few softwares myself, they are as follows :-

Free/Open Source :-

Pdfcrop is good for small files and works well. It takes long long time as well as CPU for large files and hence is almost useless for them. But i must complement the authors work and his will to release it for free. You can use it if you have upto 50-100 pages PDF.


Paid/Shareware :-

Adobe Acrobat Reader Professional  :- This is great software with inbuilt capability of croping pages, remove white margins (although some times with variable size pages get screwed up, but its good).

See http://www.itg.ias.edu/node/504 for cropping help, also try the remove margins, its just below the step to specify margins manually .

Unfortunately i couldn't find a way to increase margins in it, please comment if you know how.

Pdf annotator :- This is great software, and is good in trial version, specially if you want to edit just one or two documents :). Increasing margins also supported. Cropping is though is a bit clumsy but does job for most of the pdf's


Lastly :- If printing a book or something similar, don't forget to choose even/odd page option, according to binding and other details, else you ll end up messing the printed documents :P

Mounting Remote folder over ssh as drive in windows

Most of the times we want to mount remote folder as a drive in windows. Although windows provide a good mount feature, its some not possible to do so due to firewall restrictions. Also mounting drives from different OS such as Ubuntu/Fedora in windows is not inbuilt.. Here NetDrive comes in help, its free for non-commercial use. It can mount drive over FTP/SFTP and is great to use. Although FTP is a much faster than SFTP (FTP over SSH), but is unsecure. Just install a FTP or SSH server, configure default  foder, and use netdrive to do the rest :).

Pdf printer for windows

Hi all, recently i was stuck with pdf printers, i looked on the net but none seem to be sufficient for all my needs.


I suggest two of free pdf writers for use , doPDf  and CutePdf writer.


doPdf is good for small files especially office or html files, but performs too slow with larger files. PDF files are some what more clumsy. (If u use lpr for printing, you know sometimes you need pre-formatted documents to avoid problems later). Size is comparatively smaller than those made by other pdf writers.
Its awesome, especially for resumes. Embedding fonts option add a little extra size and some minimal quality to produced pdf (I dint find any :P).

CutePDF is faster and good for large files. The output size is slightly larger than those produced by doPDf, but the speed is a factor when printing large files. Not good for small ones.


So i suggest you to use doPdf for small files (1-50 pages) and CutePdf (50+). Also doPdf starts consuming lot of memory and CPU for large files , so it wont be practical to use. Both are small in size and can be installed side by side.

Adobe reader / Flash Player without DLM

Adobe !!! I dont want DLM but i am stuck with it .. it is forefully installed on all windows system now for reader download.. But who wants unwanted software on his comp ??

Solutions :-

1) Use thier FTP site for most of the products. This is explained in

http://www.techerator.com/2010/07/how-to-install-adobe-reader-without-installing-adobe-dlm-download-manager-browser-plugin/

Their FTP site is ftp.adobe.com

2) Solution one is awesome but i was stuck, my institute dont allow ftp access, but here good news, windows is not the only OS(although one of the best for PC, i know many would disagree). The adobe states that DLM is installed on all supported systems ( http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/520/cpsid_52001.html ). But good news is most linux distros are not supported for now, i tried on ubuntu and fedora. Just choose different OS option and download :) enjoy. You can also save the link for future reference :)


Adobe reader X for windows is available at :-
http://ardownload.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/10.x/10.0.0/en_US/AdbeRdr1000_en_US.exe

And the directory listing is forbidden :(

ardownload was initially just download.. but adobe keep changing it :( Just for forcing adobe DLM ... I thought only apple would do so .. :D


Flash player is at :-

http://fpdownload.adobe.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player.exe