2014-08-31 Today, a lot of stuff happend. My magazine grew to a size that overwhelmed Scribus's export to PDF facility, or so I thought. It used too much memory. I started with adding more swap space. With swap files (in contrast to swap partitions) this is easy: /swap2 mkswap /swap2 swapon /swap2 cat /proc/swaps This didn't solve the issue. Secondly, I added more physical RAM. 2.5 GB are surely better than 500 MB when doing DTP. (The responsivenes increase for the normal work was increadible!) But the PDF export problem remained. Each time I exported the thirty-some pages, the exporter ran for 15 minutes and crached then. I started to track down the problem by exporting smaller ranges of pages (bisecting), until I discovered the single page that crashed the exporter. What was sepcial about this page? It had lots of large images on it. After I shrunk them externally (from effectively 1200 dpi to 300 dpi) the crashes disappeared at once. Bottom line is: Keep the effec- tive dpi value of the pictures within range (less than 500 dpi if you want to achieve 300 dpi eventually). This removes a lot of load from the raster-image-processor. To process an image with about 1400 actual dpi, I shrunk it with Imagemagick: `mogrify -resize 25% foo.tiff'. Then in Scribus, I reduced its scaling factor by simply adding ``/4'' to its value. THIS is why you need these calculating number input fields! I had this huge text file, with many thousands of lines. I wanted to strip everything from some point to the end of the file. Usu- ally, I use `dG' in vi for this task. I don't use Vim but ex-vi, thus I must suffer some limitations sometimes. This was the case here. Vi wasn't able to remove so many lines in the ``normal mode''. I ended in the ``ex mode'' with an error message that ex- plained that vi wasn't able to carry out my instruction. The first time I was irritated, typed `vi' and tried it anew: Same result. The second time I accepted it and used `.,$d' in the ``ex mode'' instead. I shrug, typed `vi', and continued my work. This reminded me of [0] I should use /usr/local much more. Altough my systems are mostly single user machines, and thus I can put all the local adjust- ments (bin, src, fonts, etc.) in $HOME as well, I should put them into /usr/local instead. Not only does it keep $HOME more clean, but also provides the stuff to other users on the multi user sys- tems I maintain, and as well it's much easier to move it to other systems if it's collected in /usr/local instead of picking if out of $HOME. In consequence, I made /usr/local group-writable. Sime Ramov wrote me an email and asked if I would continue (actu- ally start again ;-) ) to develop mmh. There are already so many people asking me about mmh! How can I wait any longer? [0] http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2014- August/003331.html http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke