An update on YouTube playlist time

YouTube has changed its playlist page-code again today. If you want to see the “total playlist time” on a YouTube playlist, YouTube Playlist Time Length is now the working UserScript to use. Usage: load the playlist page, then reload it to see the total time.

Translation problems with “cover-price”

A useful note for magazine and journal editors who deal with those overseas. There appears to be a problem with mis-translation in translation services.

1. You send a request to a potential interviewee or contributor, perhaps in France.

2. You politely mention that your magazine or journal will have a “$5 cover-price”, and that it is not free, as something for the recipient to consider.

3. It seems that this phrase can be mis-translated as if a “cover-charge”, of the sort that you might encounter in a French restaurant. This being the price added just ‘to sit at the table’, without even ordering.

The risk is then that the speed-reading interviewee or contributor thinks they will be charged a small fee just to be in the magazine, which is not the case.

Setup up CutePDF for 6″ x 9″

Problem: I recently had trouble getting a good PDF from a 200,000-word book. NitroPDF failed repeatedly, being very sluggish and crashing the Windows Print Spooler. And the type quality of a vanilla “Save to PDF” just was not good enough, and also randomly defaulted bits of text to bitmapping. Which messed up back-of-the-book index-building, as well as copy-paste.

Solution: the free Ghostscript Windows installer and the free CutePDF Writer (which requires Ghostscript). Install the open-source Ghostscript utility first, then CutePDF, so you don’t have any hassles caused by CutePDF’s installer needing to go online to get Ghostscript. No reboot is then required, the new printer driver is there straight away, and accessible from File | Print.

Lovely output… very fast (even though 32-bit)… great file-size… but… you then need to know how to get a 6″ x 9″ shaped save for the PDF. 6″ x 9″ inches is a most common paperback book size demanded by print-on-demand printers. And yet perversely it has no named paper-size that ships with printer software by default, for local Windows PDF printers to use. Getting 6″ x 9″ for CutePDF thus requires a bit of a workflow.

Workflow:

1. Windows Start Menu button | Control Panel | Devices and Printers.

2. Select the new CutePDF printer | Print Server Properties | Then set up and save a new 6″ x 9″ form, thus…

Yes it’s a gnarly setup, but you only have to do it once.

3. File | Print | CutePDF | Properties | Advanced | Set your newly created 6″ x 9″ setting | Also embed the fonts by switching to “Softfont”. For POD you may also want to set Postcript Options | Font Download | Native Truetype. OK.

4. Now you’re back in that initial CutePDF Print panel. Here there’s a further vital step. “Scale to Paper Size” | Then drag the drop-down list all the way down to the bottom | Just above the new “Postscript Custom” you see the even newer 6″ x 9″ setting | Select that.

5. OK. That should be it. Both 6″ x 9″ settings are live and aligned, and you should thus get a printed-to-file PDF that matches your 6″ x 9″ Word .DOC file.

To check the fonts embedded, have Acrobat (Reader or DC) open your PDF file. Go to File | Properties | Fonts tab. You’ll see the embedded fonts. Then check the selectability of the text, to see if anything went to bitmaps.

The only thing missing with the free CutePDF Writer is 40-bit encryption to prevent copy-paste or modification. Also, it has problems with handling semi-transparency from Microsoft Publisher.

Free Windows desktop readers for ‘fixed’ ePub files

Below are the details of the only .ePUB reader software found by my tests to adequately support ‘fixed-layout + animated pictures’ with test files, on the Windows desktop.

Sure, a PC user is not necessarily going to read a whole magazine/book from a desktop monitor. But many researchers, editors etc need to consult or flick through a fixed .ePUB while at their desk. And have it look as intended, ideally in non-clunky freeware.

1. Thorium. The best and really the only viable choice for most people, though not the ideal “only choice” to foist on readers of a magazine. Well designed. Display of small type is not as good as that in Azardi. Works back to Windows 7. In slow but active development.

2. Azardi. Does the job quite well but has several problems: i) only supports fixed layout ePUB (can’t even load re-flowable ePUBs); ii) opens files with dimmed background/overlay for the pages every time, and needs to be manually adjusted back to normal brightness; iii) it triggered a delayed virus alert for me and was thus uninstalled. No longer developed since about 2016, works back to Windows 7. Free “for personal use only”, so institutions and businesses may be wary of being hit with licencing fees from whoever currently owns it.

3. Calibre. Free. Primarily used as a conversion software, but also has a reader and ebook manager. Feels and looks old, though it isn’t. It’s just clunky. Actively developed, and has now long been “Windows 10 only”.

There is also Sigil, the dedicated ePub editor. It appears to only preview the first page of an ePub, and as such is not also a Windows reader option for the desktop.

While the DTP software Adobe InDesign can preview a document destined for a fixed ePub, to ePub standards, it cannot then re-import this output and preview it again. Nor can QuarkXpress.

I could not find any Chrome browser extension that explicitly stated “fixed layout” support. The Microsoft Edge browser had this feature until a few years ago, but the feature was killed off. The old Readium extension for Chrome also went, because it could no longer support javascript.

Windows 10 and 11 desktop users who allow mobile-style “apps” from the Microsoft Store may perhaps find one or two ePub readers there, though they have not been tested here for ‘fixed-layout + animated picture’ support.

ScreenToGif Portable – now un-shackled from .NET and FFmpeg

Possibly useful for those making short educational screen-capture tutorials for online display or bundling alongside a .PDF file. As of February 2022 the excellent open-source freeware ScreenToGif Portable no longer requires clunky extra downloads, such as Microsoft .NET Framework or the infernal FFmpeg. Currently the 68Mb ScreenToGif.2.37.1.Portable.x64.zip is the download that most Windows people will want.

ScreenToGif can also output screen recordings to .APNG (animated PNG), which may help if your audience or environment is likely to have .GIF blockers installed. Simply manually rename to .PNG for upload to blogs etc. Web browsers will still recognise it as containing multiple frames, and play it (all major browser now support animated .PNGs). ScreenToGif can set the number of loops to show.

And, yes, there is javascript to ‘play, pause, continue’ an .aPNG on a Web page. So if you have multiple tutorial steps, the reader doesn’t have to see them all animating at once. Also look at another solution.

Or for a simple HTML solution, this works and does have them all play once (assuming one loop). Then it hands over control to the user in the form of “click to replay”.

Yes, you would add math.random here as a cache-buster, but using it appears to mess up the timings of the frames in the replay. The above works fine for reloading the same image on Chrome/Firefox-based browsers, and does not cause problems with frame slippage. You’re welcome.

Note that free WordPress blogs do not support the format, and the uploaded .PNG will there become a normal file that just shows the first frame of the animation. To host and run an animated .PNG file you need your own Web space.

Popular freeware viewers such as IrfanView can (since 2016) run animated .PNG files locally on your PC.

Sadly they can’t be embedded in PDF magazines, and still animate. They can in fixed layout ePubs, but the problem there is Windows. Basically, you have to force your readers to use Thorium, as that’s the only viable ‘fixed layout + animation’ reader choice on Windows desktops.

A new ‘multi paste’ UserScript

This may be useful for those who have to repetitively fill in a great many forms via a Web browser. A new browser UserScript today, for Multi paste…

Copy every word from the clipboard into multiple consecutive input fields

The copy-pasted clipboard data needs to be in simple comma-separated form. So I assume phrases or article titles would also work, if comma-separated. Those who do this sort of thing by hand, for a living, probably have better solutions. But it may be useful for someone with just 100 or so such actions to perform.

HTTP Downloader

I went in search of a good freeware downloader software, because the Web browser add-on DownThemAll! had failed me. It had worked well in the past, but I discovered it has a limit on import. Adding a list of links to 268 .JP2 files was beyond its capabilities. Even cutting the .txt list of files into two halves didn’t help.

So, Windows freeware ‘to the rescue’. After trying a few, HTTP Downloader was the choice. It may look old-school but the author Eric Kutcher last updated it in July 2022. Genuine freeware, and it’s 64-bit.

Very simple to use. Give it access to the Web. Copy your one-per-line list of links to the clipboard. Paste in. It starts rolling through a list of multiple downloads, eight at a time. That’s it.

The software had no problem with a big download run, 3Gb in total.

Also interesting, from the same author, is his 2018 Google Search Results Filter. For Firefox based browsers only, so presumably also including Pale Moon.

Remove the grey ‘Opera Account’ icon

Here’s how to remove the pointless grey ‘Opera Account’ icon. It has been added to a key area of the UI in the latest Opera browser, right next to Downloads.

1. In the browser’s address-bar type or paste opera://flags and then press Enter.

2. You will be taken to the “Experimental page”. There you click in the “Search Flags” search-box, and type account popup to get this…

3. “Disable” the Account icon and panel, and then re-launch Opera. The icon should now be gone.

Shrink the Google News headlines

Google News search results now have overly large ‘shouty’ headlines. Shrink them down a bit by adding this to whatever Stylus or UserScript CSS-fixer you have running…

.MBeuO {
font-size: 16px;}

Before and after:

Fixing Opera’s problem with Google Search + spellcheck

PROBLEM: The spellchecker in the Opera Web browser now only partly works in the Google Search box. Opera’s spellchecker underlines mis-spelled words, but can no longer offer any suggestions and make replacements. It works perfectly in other search-engines and on WordPress posts etc. But not in the Google Search box, for some unknown reason. Tests show that uBlock Origin is not preventing the spellcheck from working properly.

I tried a great many possible solutions, seeking a simple elegant right-click option that didn’t try to do 20 others things or send the word off to Whereizitagain to be ‘checked’. And which could work in Google Search.

SOLUTION: The Windows desktop offline solution I found was a combination of the old abandonware Spell Magic and the mouse-gesture freeware StrokesPlus (old version).

Spell Magic needs: General Options | Silent Spell Check Mode | On. While StrokesPlus needs: Preferences: Allow Left Click | On.

Then you set up your StokesPlus ‘S’ mouse-gesture with this mini-script…

USAGE: Once this is set up the user places their mouse-cursor anywhere over the mis-spelled word in the Google Search box. Then they right-click and draw the ‘S’ mouse-gesture with StrokesPlus. The gesture completes and the script then automatically runs the cursor back to the starting point of the gesture, and there does a double left-click. The word is thus selected and highlighted, and the script next calls Spell Magic into action on it.

The user manually chooses a replacement word, and then Spell Magic is able to make the replacement in the Google Search box. Spell Magic then exits to the Windows System Tray, ready for future action on some another word.

Also works in all other Windows-centric software, though sadly not on typed text in Photoshop. Spell Magic dictionaries are in the .ADM format and many are freely available from Addictive Software. One final thing to note is that Spell Magic will not launch if it thinks the word is correct.

On rare occasions Spell Magic will repeatedly fail to capture the word for checking. Exiting and re-starting the software seems to cure the problem.