How Did I Fix That?

Searching for non-ASCII characters in a file

Most online solutions involve grep -P -n "[\x80-\xFF]" but these solutions do not work on Mac OS X or BSD variants of grep. Instead, use Perl for a more portable solution:
perl -ne 'print if /[^[:ascii:]]/' filename.txt

Tags: software, textprocessing, Unix, MacOS

Shrinking large PDF images

So you have some large (MB-sized) PDF images and you need to reduce them in size, maybe because arXiv requires images to be compressed. Starting with a file f1.pdf (1031756 bytes):

• Use ImageMagick to compress to JPG or PNG and then re-encode as PDF. The JPG compression is very efficient, but the PDF re-encoding is not.

  convert f1.pdf -format JPG -quality 50 f1a.jpg  → 78532 bytes (7.6%)
  convert f1.pdf -format JPG -quality 10 f1a.pdf	→ 758028 bytes (73%)
  convert f1.pdf -format JPG -quality 90 f1a.pdf	→ 758028 bytes (73%)
  convert f1.pdf -format PNG -quality 50 f1a.pdf	→ 758028 bytes (73%)
  

• ImageMagick output can be processed with jpeg2ps and then epstopdf for better results:

  convert f1.pdf -format JPG -quality 50 f1a.jpg
  jpeg2ps f1a.jpg > f1a.eps
  epstopdf f1a.eps   → 81228 bytes (8%)
  

• Use Ghostscript with the /screen or /ebook PDF output settings.

  gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
         -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -sOutputFile=f1b.pdf f1.pdf  → 176120 bytes (17%)
  

  The /ebook setting output was nearly the same size as the /screen output.
• On Mac OS X (10.14.5 Mojave), exporting from Preview with the "Reduce File Size" Quartz filter gave excellent results (105368 bytes, 10%). This is harder to access from the command line, but the default filter is at:

  /System/Library/Filters/Reduce File Size.qfilter
  

  and the ColorSync utility can create modified versions of that filter in the ~/Library/Filters folder.
  Preview's Save as JPG also gives very good results:

  Quality setting = 7 [1...9]  → 166649 bytes (16%)
  Quality setting = 5 [1...9]  → 87077 bytes (8.5%)
  

• Adobe Acrobat Pro has a PDF Optimizer, but does not give as compact results even with 72 DPI output and minimum JPG quality settings (412528 bytes, 40%). Photoshop and Illustrator can produce fairly compact JPGs that can be wrapped back into PDF files (as above), but Preview offers a simple and good enough solution.

Bottom line: Use Preview for conversions by hand, or use the ImageMagick convert utility for JPG output, then wrap it as PDF via jpeg2ps and epstopdf, if scripting is required.

Tags: software, MacOS, graphics, PDF

What's inside a mystery software package file?

A package (.pkg file in OS X) is an .xar archive containing a cpio.gz archive of installable files in "Payload", along with a "bill of materials", scripts, etc. To inspect the contents, unpack the .xar into a directory, and then open the Payload file:

mkdir scratch; cd scratch
xar -xf ../mystery.pkg
gunzip -dc Payload | cpio -i

The file hierarchy shows where the contents of the package would be distributed during installation.

Tags: MacOS, software

No sound on my Mac

Switching the output sound device repeatedly (e.g., going back and forth between external speakers and headphones several times) sometimes kills sound output on my laptop (currently on OS X 10.13 High Sierra). To fix, restart the Core Audio services:

sudo killall coreaudiod

Annoying, but workable.

Tags: MacOS, bug-workaround

Why won't my Mac go to sleep?

On Mac OS X 10.13 (High Sierra), power management status is reported by:

pmset -g
pmset -g assertions

Items with non-zero assertions (like "UserIsActive") are preventing sleep.

Tags: MacOS