Skip to main content

Annotating pdfs with skim

For Mac there is this nice shiny aplication called skim, that looks very nice. You can add notes, highlight (two-column does not work) and export the notes. The notes appear as a list in a sidebar as you work. Importantly skim stores the annotations in the file itself. So why am I not using smim yet? Unfortunately the annotations seem to be in a skim specific format, so that preview can not pick it up (and so acrobat reader might not either). Skim is not available for windows, so I'm not sure if I should lock myself in.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A note on Python's __exit__() and errors

Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or...

Remove field code from Word document

e.g. before submitting a MS, or hand manipulating some formatting because Word does things (like cross-references) so half-assed [from here ] Select all the text (CTRL-A) Press Ctrl+Shift+F9 Editing to remove anonymous comments that only contain thanks. I really appreciate the thanks, but it makes it harder to find comments that carry pertinent information. I'm also going to try and paste informative comments in the body of the post to make them easier to find.

Store numpy arrays in sqlite

Use numpy.getbuffer (or sqlite3.Binary ) in combination with numpy.frombuffer to lug numpy data in and out of the sqlite3 database: import sqlite3, numpy r1d = numpy.random.randn(10) con = sqlite3.connect(':memory:') con.execute("CREATE TABLE eye(id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, desc TEXT, data BLOB)") con.execute("INSERT INTO eye(desc,data) VALUES(?,?)", ("1d", sqlite3.Binary(r1d))) con.execute("INSERT INTO eye(desc,data) VALUES(?,?)", ("1d", numpy.getbuffer(r1d))) res = con.execute("SELECT * FROM eye").fetchall() con.close() #res -> #[(1, u'1d', <read-write buffer ptr 0x10371b220, size 80 at 0x10371b1e0>), # (2, u'1d', <read-write buffer ptr 0x10371b190, size 80 at 0x10371b150>)] print r1d - numpy.frombuffer(res[0][2]) #->[ 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0.] print r1d - numpy.frombuffer(res[1][2]) #->[ 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0. 0.] Note that for work where data ty...