Dorchester — May 12th 2015

The evening started with a review of PDFs. David set the ball rolling with a brief history of the PDF, PostScript and CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) which allows the Mac to save any document as a PDF. He ran through the various ways of saving documents as PDFs via the Print dialogue. Mark demonstrated three useful Apps available from the App Store. 1) "PDF Toolset" for grouping a number of pdfs into a single document. 2) "PDF Squeezer" a user friendly App for reducing the size of a pdf and 3) "PDF Form Filler" to add text, insert pictures and fill out boxes with check marks. He suggested that, while each of the functions is not possible in standard Apple software such as Preview, he finds these utilities very straightforward to use. Euan expanded on the history of the PDF and showed how you can merge PDFs and move pages around within a PDF document using Preview. He explained that PDFs come in a number of formats such as PDF/X-1a etc. made available by Adobe as open source. He explained how Quartz filters can change the characteristics of a pdf on the Mac, for example reducing the size of a PDF by reducing the resolution of included images. Quartz filters are part of the ColorSync system and you can create your own using the ColorSync Utility. Euan uses Preview for general use on the Mac, but drew attention to the useful print dialogue box in Adobe Reader (free download), which includes booklet and tiled format output. This prompted a Question from Andy who had had difficulty printing a booklet produced in Pages. He had subsequently downloaded a"little script" to print a booklet from Pages using PDF. After the meeting he confirmed that the “little script” is a small App called “Create Booklet” currently £7.99.

After the break Jenny described building a 3D printer. The initial enthusiasm of her group for making one from scratch soon proved frustratingly slow, so they decided to investigate the kit market starting with RepRapPro but finally selecting the more competitively priced Makibox (it now looks as though this company is ’reorganising', their site is now called Makiboxclearance). Jenny said that the overall design seems fine, but she had some doubts about tight manufacturing tolerances as simple assembly required some hand fitting. With her software background Jenny was working on the driver for the printer and had elected to use a Raspberry Pi running Linux. (As an aside Jenny advised anyone thinking of buying a Raspberry Pi to opt for the latest version Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.) The input to the software will be CAD DXF which slices a 3D object into multiple layers of 2D. Members’ demand for the initial output seems to be knobs for kitchen lids and gas cookers — no longer supported for spares! Jenny was invited come back in a year with an update and a sample of the output, kitchen knob or whatever.

Time to rise to the John Lemon’s Garageband Challenge from the March meeting. It was generally agreed that Garageband was a lot more difficult to use and less intuitive, at least on the Mac, than some expected. David had leaned on his musical sister Diana for their input, two short tracks the second of which included a lyric about Dorchester WAMUG. Andy used his brand new iPad (“just getting to know it”) to play a lovely track showing his guitar player's skills using the simulated guitar in Garageband — over which he had laid some rhythm and backing. Georgia used GarageBand to produce an amusing podcast with a musical backing. John showed how to cut back the length of a backing track which exceeded the other notation by a long way. Euan’s creation showed an ecclesiastical bent with rather somber Harp and Organ, but he had learned the art of adjusting single notes by pitch and length (including dwell) for musical effect. By volume of applause Andy was the clear winner — and great fun was had by all. John gave Michael a month to come up with the prize. It was agreed that it would be good to create some more compositions as a group at a future meeting. John was happy to coordinate this effort. It was also agreed that as the IOS version is more intuitive, we should start with that before turning to the OS X version which has a much greater power but is harder to get to grips with.

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