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Adobe’s “Generic Postscript Printer” can be downloaded here. However, by default, it prints text in grey only. This is, because it needs a the postscript colour definitions to be loaded during installation process. In order to do so, start the installer, choose “FILE” as port and after this dialogue you will be asked what printer you want to choose. The only entry you see is “Generic Postscript Printer”. Now download the file defpscol.ppd (mirror of defpscol.ppd) and select it by browsing to the place you put it within the Adobe installer dialogue.  Choose it and you’re done.

Creating PDF documents is quite easy. For instance, Open Office is capable of exporting PDF while Adobe^® Acrobate, which is a professional solution by Adobe^® Systems, offers a wide range of additional features. One of the most powerful features is creation of PDF/A documents.  This special format creates PDFs which is meant for long-term archiving.

However, there is a very useful free open-source tool called PDFCreator which is also capable of creating PDF/A documents.  You only need to download PDFCreator and follow these instructions:

• Print any document from any application you like
• As the printer, choose PDFCreator
• Click on “O.K.” or “Print” or whatever
• A dialog pops up. Click on “Properties”
• To the left, click on “Program” (if not already chosen)
• Click on “Ghostscript” (which is actually the engine that creates PDFs)
• Copy and paste the following line into the upper text box (“Additional Ghostscript Parameters”):

  -dPDFA|-f|<gslib>

  
  

• Click on “Save” and again on “Save”

You are done. A PDF/A document is created. You may want to check this. If you have e.g. Adobe^® Acrobate Reader installed, all you need to do is to open the just created PDF and have a look at small bar to the very left. You should see a small icon which reads “PDF” at its top left and shows the letter “i” at its bottom right. This indicates that there are additional information available. Click on that icon. You should see “Conformance. Standard: PDF/A-1B. ISO Name: ISO 19005-1″. If so, you document is actually a PDF/A one.

Prerequisite

This is a summary of the steps you need to take in order to make use of Google’s services from your local client. Here is a list of software you need to download and install:

• Mozilla Thunderbird: This is a free e-mail client. Calendar and task functionality will be added by some add-ons (see next bullets)
• Lightning: This is an add-on for Thunderbird. Download it, start Thunderbird and from the menu bar select “Extras” -> “Add-Ons” and press the “Install” button. Choose the download, wait until installation has finished and restart Thunderbird
• Provider for Google Calendar: Another add-on for Thunderbird. This one enables bidirectional communication with Google calendar. Just install it
• Google Contacts 0.5.51: Another add-on for Thunderbird. This one is used to synchronize the address books of Thunderbird and Google
• Gmail IMAP Account Setup: A wizard for setting up a google IMAP in Thunderbird. Google’s IMAP account uses lables (tags) which is not so straight-foreward to cope with. This wizard not only sets up your account easily, but it also performs some optimizations. Use it rather than setting up your account manually

Set-up Google Mail

• In Thunderbird, choose “Extras” -> “Accounts” from the menu bar and press “New Account”
• Choose “Google Mail IMAP”
• Just enter your login name. The wizard will do the rest for you.

Add a Google Calendar

First, you need to get the URL of your calendar

• Go to the Google Calendar site using your internet browser
• Choose “Preferences” (top right)
• Choose “Calendar” from the tab that appears
• Click on the calendar name
• Scroll down
• Click on the “XML” button, preferably the one of your private adress
• Right click on the link and choose “Copy Link”

Now add the link within you clipboard to Thunderbird’s calendar:

• In Thunderbird, choose “Calendar” from the tab at the left bottom
• From the menu bar, choose “Calendar” -> “New Calendar”
• Choose “From Network” and continue
• Choose “Google Calendar” and paste the URL you just copied into the text field
• Finally, choose a name, a colour and you’re done
• Setup the “Contacts” add-on. It is pretty easy, you’ll find your way

Celebrate …

I’ve been trying to find out the best way to create an ePub-format document. Of course, I could have used a well-known Adobe product, however, I found a way of creating such books without the use of any commercial software. Here’s the list of free software you need:

• Amaya: Your text needs to be a valid xhtml document. You could use any of your favoured text or xml editor. This one is my favoured. Remember to use “xhtml 1.1″. However, if you think you are familiar enough with XHTML, you could use any text editor you like
• Calibre: This is the converter program that turns your xhtml into an ePub document

Oops … that’s it. Two programs only.

Now open Amaya and create a XHTML 1.1 document. Save it. It is important to make excessive use of headers with the class="chapter" attribute. Here is an example of a minimal hello-world.xhtml document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
      "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
  <title>Hello World</title>
  <meta name="generator" content="Amaya, see http://www.w3.org/Amaya/" />
</head>
<body>
<h1 class="chapter">Hello World: Chapter 1</h1>
<p>This is the text of the first chapter.</p>
<h1 class="chapter">Hello World: Chapter 2</h1>
<p>And some more text. Remember that the header tag must contain the
<code>class="chapter"</code> attribute.</p>
</body>
</html>

Mind the red class attribute. It is a good idea to generate a minimal stylesheet (.css) file that solely contains a definition of the chapter class, e.g.:

.chapter {}

and bind it to your xhtml document using <link href="standard.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />. Why? Well, this way the chapter style shows up in Amaya’s style tab from which you can choose it easily when creating a header.

If you want to make sure your XHTML document is valid, use html tidy in order to check it:

tidy -asxhtml -utf8  -i -m YOURDOCUMENT.html

Well, the rest is straight foreward: Start Calibre and import you xhtml document. Add meta tags and create your ePub document.