Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

 

Pick an apple! 
Become a TidBITS member!
 

 

TidBITS Watchlist
 
Find Text Leading from Acrobat PDF

Ever have to recreate a document from an Acrobat PDF? You can find out most everything about the text by using the Object Inspector, except the leading. Well, here's a cheesy way to figure it out. Open the PDF in Illustrator (you just need one page). Release any and all clipping masks. Draw a guide at the baseline of the first line of text, and one on the line below. Now, Option-drag the first line to make a copy, and position it exactly next to the original first line at baseline. Then put a return anywhere in the copied line. Now adjust leading of the copied lines, so that the second line of copy rests on the baseline of the second line of the original. Now you know your leading.

Or you could buy expensive software to find the leading. Your choice.

Visit Mac Production Artist Tips and Scripts


Link to this tip

Submitted by
Greg Ledger

Share your own tip! | Search TipBITS

 

 

Published in TidBITS 4.
Subscribe to our weekly email edition.

 

 
07 May 1990 | Print Printer-Friendly Version of This Article

Stealth Mac

by Adam C. Engst Send Email to Author

Send Article to a Friend

It may not be able to avoid airport metal detectors, but Colby Systems hopes that its new Mac portable will be less obtrusive than other entries in the portable market. The new portable from Colby is based on a motherboard from one of the compact Macs, the Mac Plus, SE, and SE/30. Standard on the Stealth (a tentative name still), will be a keyboard with function keys, trackball, battery, and double-supertwist LCD display with fluorescent backlighting (the screen alone sounds like a gymnastics routine). The weight depends on various options, of course, but a user can separate the 3.5 lb screen, keyboard, and trackball unit from the main CPU unit for lap usage, although it won't help in carrying.

Options include a 20 meg 'floptical' drive from Insite Peripherals, 20 or 40 meg 2.5" hard drives, and a 2400/9600 modem/send-fax modem card. Stranger and more intriguing options for the Stealth include an internal voice recognition system from Articulate Systems for $799. An extra $200 will add fax-modem capabilities to the voice recognition board. The final option is the Private Eye virtual-display, which is a head-mounted screen that produces an image of the screen floating in space before the user's eyes. For more information on the Private Eye, search for "Private Eye" or look through the articles in the 23-Apr-90 section of the TidBITS Archive.

Colby Systems -- 415/941-9090
Related articles:
MacWEEK -- 08-May-90, Vol. 4 #18, pg. 4

 

Dragon speech recognition software for Macintosh, iPhone, and iPad!
Get the all-new Dragon Dictate for Mac from Nuance Communications
and experience Simply Smarter Speech Recognition.
Learn more about Dragon Dictate: <http://nuance.com/dragon/mac>