November 27, 2023

From Text Objects in Vim to Text Blocks in Gutenberg for WordPress.

About Vim and Gutenberg.

Vim is a command-line editor. Gutenberg for WordPress is a visual editor.

Vim was created in 1987, as an evolution from the earlier Vi. Gutenberg has become the default editor for WordPress since version 5.0 of the CMS, released on November 27, 2018.

They are chronologically and structurally very distant writing tools.

But despite the differences, there are also some similarities.

Vim allows writing by treating text as an “object.” Gutenberg allows writing by treating text as a “block.”

October 22, 2023

Linux: rename, rename.ul, prename, perl-rename: what a confusion!

Summary of this article.

In this article I report some observations on how to rename documents in GNU/Linux using text commands, clarifying some differences between various distributions.

The rename command does not, in fact, have unique behavior in distributions derived from Debian versus those derived from Fedora and Arch.

I will try to clarify the content of different commands and the different behavior of commands that have the same name.

September 21, 2023

Two open-source solutions for framing images

What is the topic of this article?

In this article, I describe two simple methods for decorating both single and multiple images with an outline frame, using two open-source resources in the GNU/Linux operating environment.

The first solution uses a graphics application. The second, on the other hand, is command-line.

Adding a frame to images is very useful in excerpts of documents published on sites and blogs.

In these cases, in fact, adding a border serves to “detach” documents published as images from the base document in which they are published.

August 11, 2023

LaTeX: some considerations on font size

LaTeX: class definition, standard classes and font sizes.

In LaTeX, the term “class” refers to a predefined or custom document type that determines the general layout, style, and options available for formatting a document.

The classes in LaTeX are identified by the file extension .cls and provide the basic instructions for document structure.

The main features of a class in LaTeX relate to the page format as well as the style of the title, of the sections and text.

June 26, 2023

Powerful OCR system under GNU/Linux for PDF documents managed from command line and with refinement by Vim.

Introduction.

The idea came from reading this article about optical character recognition (OCR) in the GNU/Linux environment from images and PDF, managed from the command line.

Obviously, PDF documents are those scanned from paper original, i.e., not obtained by direct saving of document in digital format. For the latter, no OCR is needed.

The article is very well written and the end result is very good.

I wondered if it would be possible to aggregate all the steps into a single text command.

May 7, 2023

Notes on resolving differences between two documents with the built-in resources of Vim and Emacs

What are we talking about?

In this article, I report my practical experience on how to use the built-in resources of Vim and Emacs to resolve and undo differences between two documents.

In fact, I’ve occasionally updated two documents in such a “messy” way that I could no longer remember which updates to keep on one and the other.

Both Vim and Emacs offer very simple and effective built-in tools for checking and resolving such differences.