Slow progress...

So there I am, "printing" from Word to PDF using Acrobat.

Word's settings clearly state I want to see my document "printed" on letter-sized paper. Adobe shows me a document on A4 paper, not only with no apparent way to change the paper size without "reprinting" the document, but there also does not seem to be any obvious way to configure pages to appear in letter size.

Having learned long ago (about the second time I used it) that the help feature in the program is crap, I turned to the Internet, with the rather straightforward query

printing from word to acrobat wrong paper format

Scanning the first few hits, I see

When I print from Word to PDF the page settings are lost.

That sounded promising, so I clicked on the link. Amazingly, most of the page was completely useless, but I did catch the following:

Change the default by going to start>printers right-click the pdf printer and select printing prefs.

So I brought up Printers from the Start menu, right-clicked on Adobe PDF, selected Properties and engaged in a tab-by-tab foray to change any A4 setting to Letter.

I'll be dipped if it didn't work!

Time to add another page to that book of "little tricks."

Progress in PHP and Emacs...

For better or worse, for as long as I've been writing invoices for translations, I've always used invoice numbers that start with the last two digits of the year, followed by a three-digit invoice number, and the Intuit software that I used to use for invoicing understood how to handle the format and automatically increment invoice numbers, e.g., 14-101, 14-102, etc.

Unfortunately, my current vehicle for invoicing, an open source package called BambooInvoice, doesn't, and so I've been forced to remind myself to enter an invoice number in the appropriate field when creating an invoice, because the penalty for not doing so is to have BambooInvoice clear all of the data that's been entered and repaint the screen with the "starting" screen for new invoice entry, along with an error message to the effect that a valid number is needed.

In terms of design, this approach sucks, of course. The graceful way to deal with this situation would be to, for example, create an invoice with a dummy number, or redisplay the page with the entered data while prompting for an invoice number, but the software is what it is.

Until today, when I dug into the guts of the code and did a little modification that fills in the invoice number field with "14-" It's only a partial fix, true, but it prevents that awful wiple-the-slate-clean behavior. (I would have had it display an incremented number as well—and I may get around to it, someday—but I just didn't have the time to do it today.)

Feeling empowered and also tired of repetitively typing the same series of keystrokes into emacs to finalize processing of jobs, I did a little research to figure out how to bind a key-chord to not just a command, but a series of keystrokes. I ended up with the following:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-<f10>")
   (kbd "C-c C-t z M-x org-archive-subtree"))

What it basically does is change the status of the task at point to DONE, and then calls the function org-archive-subtree, which moves the task I've just modified out of the active task file into an archive file. Even if you consider that my setup contains a key binding that reduces the function call to the keychord C-<f11> (so that closing out and moving each task can be done by pressing four keys or keychords), this new binding does it all with one.

Frankly, I wasn't at all sure this code would work, but it did.

Getting stuff like this to work makes a fella feel downright empowered!