Spread pages book layout in PDF documents

This week I composed a document with flyleaf and subsequent two-paged layout like in these two examples with Adobe Indesign and Microsoft Word:

But when exporting/printing to a PDF file the PDF document in Acrobat Reader shows only a single page at a time. One may manually select the view option with two-paged layout and flyleaf but I wanted the document to be always shown that way! After Googling I found a solution using Adobe Acrobat Pro where it is possible to set this option and save the changes directly to the PDF file. Unfortunately Acrobat Pro isn’t cheap and I don’t own a copy so I looked for an alternative.

Finally I found BeCyPDFMetaEdit by Benjamin Bentmann which is a small freeware Windows utility for changing the XMP meta data of a PDF document file. The viewer preference actually is just a XMP setting. The program can remove any application or pdf printer metadata as well (like “Created with …foo program” or “Printed using PDF…bar”). The result after opening the PDF document in Adobe Acrobat Reader then looks like (before vs. after):

Ta-da, A book!

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Perl -e in Windows batch and Linux shell scripts

Recently I had to extract a partial string from a space-seperated list of names in a loop within a script. There have to be two versions of that script, one for Windows and one for Linux shell. To loop through one such list is quite easy, in Windows:

@echo off
SETLOCAL
set WEBSITES=Test1 Test2 Test3

FOR /D %%A IN (%WEBSITES%) DO (
echo WebsiteName=%%A
)
GOTO :EOF

ENDLOCAL

and in Linux shell:

WEBSITES="Test1 Test2 Test3"

for WEBSITE_ALIAS in $WEBSITES ; do
echo "Website= $WEBSITE_ALIAS ..."
done

But now came a second list of string into play containing the domain names of the website aliases:

WEBSITES="Test1 Test2 Test3"
DOMAINNAMES="www.test1.lan www.test2.lan www.test3.lan"

In a conventional programming language I would just use a for-loop with an index variable and utilize that variable to access both arrays within one loop. But in that batch/shell scripting this turned out to be quite tricky. My solution here was a small inline PERL script. For Windows:

set WEBSITE_UNIT=Unit4
set WEBSITES=Test1 Test2 Test3
set DOMAINNAMES=www.test1.lan www.test2.lan www.test3.lan
perl -e "use strict; die("argv mismatch!") if !@ARGV or scalar(@ARGV) < 2; my @Websites = split(/[s,;|]/, $ARGV[0]); my @Domains = split(/[s,;|]/, $ARGV[1]); die("number of aliases differs from domain names!") if scalar(@Websites) != scalar(@Domains); for(my $i=0; $i<scalar(@Websites); $i++) { system('perl dosomething.pl -user /Root/'.$ENV{'WEBSITE_UNIT'}.'/admin -passwd admin -servername '.$ENV{'SERVER_NAME'}.' -alias '.$Website[$i].''); system('perl doanotherthing.pl -user /Root/'.$ENV{'WEBSITE_UNIT'}.'/admin -passwd admin -alias '.$Website[$i].' DomainName="'.$Domains[$i].'"'); }" "%WEBSITES%" "%DOMAINNAMES%"

And for Linux:

WEBSITE_UNIT=Unit4
WEBSITES="Test1 Test2 Test3"
DOMAINNAMES="www.test1.lan www.test2.lan www.test3.lan"
perl -e 'use strict; die("argv mismatch!") if !@ARGV or scalar(@ARGV) < 2; my @Websites = split(/[s,;|]/, $ARGV[0]); my @Domains = split(/[s,;|]/, $ARGV[1]); die("number of aliases differs from domain names!") if scalar(@Websites) != scalar(@Domains); for(my $i=0; $i<scalar(@Websites); $i++) { system("perl dosomething.pl -user /Root/'${WEBSITE_UNIT}'/admin -passwd admin -servername ".$ENV{"SERVER_NAME"}." -alias ".$Website[$i].""); system("perl doanotherthing.pl -user /Root/'${WEBSITE_UNIT}'/admin -passwd admin -alias ".$Website[$i]." DomainName="".$Domains[$i]."""); }' "$WEBSITES" "$DOMAINNAMES"

Notice the different handling of the ticks and quotes and the different access to external parameters. In Windows there’s no difference in PERL’s $ENV hash whether accessing real environment variables or local variables set by the batch script. Not so under Linux: I can only access my system-wide exported environment variable SERVER_NAME using $ENV but not my local script’s WEBSITE_UNIT variable. When using the exec -e with perl for Windows I had to use quotes to wrap the execution PERL-code but for linux shell, I needed single -ticks which can NOT be used inside the PERL code – not event when escapting them like ‘. The single ticks are “reserved” by the shell script for being able to insert shell variables anywhere.