SmileOnMyMac Blog

I stumbled in college on a class called Multivariable Calculus, and never took another math class, so I cannot pretend to have come up with this tip myself. John from Stanford sent this in:

For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to add math margin notes to a PDF. With OS X’s PDF-based display, this seemed like it should be possible, but Acrobat doesn’t do it. It cannot accept PDFs that are drag/dropped or pasted. I was even considering writing some tool to do it, but I found the way: a combination of LaTeX Equation Editor (free, great with Keynote) and PDFpen.

With these two programs, you can type LaTeX into LaTeX Equation Editor, then drag-and-drop the resulting mini PDF onto your PDF in PDFpen, resize it there, and save. [sample below]

One caveat is that PDFpen has to be in pointer mode or have most recently used the insert-image-or-PDF button; if it’s in scribble or other annotation mode it does not accept the drop.

Nowadays, most of my knowledge of complex mathematical equations comes from watching the (improbable but entertaining) TV show NUMB3RS, but the tip itself made sense to me.

Another tip from Tim in Ohio, who contributed Organize your abbreviations by context:

Ever find a website that doesn’t have a search function?

For me that site is Palm Addicts (http://palmaddict.typepad.com). Problem is that I can never remember the URL, and even if I could, that’s a lotta typing.

Google will let you restrict their results to a website by adding “site:domain.here” such as “site:palmaddict.typepad.com” to your search string.

I have a TextExpander shortcut “/spa” (Search Palm Addicts). I enter it in the Google search field and it expands to:

%| site:palmaddict.typepad.com

%| (percentage and pipe character) tells TextExpander to reposition the cursor at the beginning, so I can enter the search string at the beginning without having to manually move the cursor. I type in the word “calendar” and Google shows me all the Palm Addict pages that have the word “calendar” in them.

This would be useful even if a site had a search function. You could skip the steps of 1) going to the web site, 2) tabbing to the search box and 3) entering your search term – just go right to the Google search field in your browser and enter your TextExpander abbreviation.

We were happy to be a sponsor of the annual Mac Computer Expo, a great event put on by the North Coast Mac Users Group (NCMUG). We did demos of our software, and got to talk to lots of Mac users.

Greg the intrepid demo guy

Lots of interest in SmileOnMyMac

Jean, Greg, Philip

Here’s a tip from Jean in Portland, Oregon: (yeah, that’s actually me…)

If you are filling out a form using PDFpen’s Text tool, you can do it a lot faster if you double-click the Text tool before starting. By default, the Text tool reverts to the Select tool after each use. Double-clicking overrides this behavior. The Text tool will stay active and you’ll be able to fill out the whole form without switching back and forth between tools.

As a member of the SmileOnMyMac team, I’m not eligible for the thank-you gift we offer to customers whose user tips we post. Send me your PDFpen tips at jean@smileonmymac.com; if we use your tip, you get your choice of any one of our six terrific applications!