Here is a list of some graphics software I find useful:

Raster graphics

The GIMP A cross-platform photo and image editor

Phatch A cross-platform photo batch processor

Geeqie An excellent and fast image viewer and organiser for Linux

DigiKam A photo-editor and manager for Linux

IrfanView An excellent image viewer …

This blog entry was originally written in April 2007.

As almost anyone will know, the de facto "standard" document format for the last decade or so has been the MS Word Document, or .doc file. Every week I receive dozens of .doc and .xls files per e-mail. And every now …

This blog entry was originally written in June 2008.

Although it has hardly received any media attention here amongst the hype of the European Soccer Championships, just over a week ago the FAO organised a big conference on World Food Security. As I had some trouble concentrating on my research …

After upgrading to Ubuntu 10.4 LTS, I was happy to notice that audio in all applications (including Skype) was finally working perfectly! However, I was less happy to notice that Pulseaudio was using quite a lot of CPU-time, and that the sound quality was absolutely awful... So I decided …

Creating and printing a multi-page CD booklet can be a bit of a headache. Firstly, not all programs support the re-ordering of pages required to make a foldable double-sided booklet. Moreover, the page-size is non-standard, which may give difficulties with commandline-tools such as Ghostscript and psnup. It took me a …

A while back I wrote a course-reader in OpenOffice.org Writer on Ubuntu. When I submitted it for printing, it turned out that not all fonts were embedded in the document, which led to various printing- and layout-problems. Here's some advice on how to create PDFs that are suitable for …

There are at least three ways to do this in Ubuntu. You will need the packages ghostscript (for all methods, but installed by default) and pdftk (for method 2), and optionally a Java Runtime Environment (for method 3).

Method 1: ps2pdf

The ps2pdf script that comes with Ghostscript is meant …

The other day I found out I had misspelled a word in a whole batch of automatically generated PDF files. Regenerating all of them would be a lot of work, as the PDF files were plots created using perl/PDL, gnuplot and epstopdf (available in texlive-extra-utils), and the input data …

Older versions of Ubuntu (before 8.04) used to have a built-in font-manager that could be reached by browsing font:/// in the file-manager. However, when Gnome upgraded to their new gvfs in 2008, their font manager and viewer both stopped working. In current Ubuntu-versions, at least the built-in font viewer …

PDL is an extension of Perl for numeric/scientific data processing. It was originally developed by astrophysicists as a free alternative to packages like IDL and Matlab. It's quite fast and memory-efficient, and very powerful. I've found it to be most useful in cases where you have to mix data-processing …