So here’s the problem. I like to print out long PDF articles to read offline. I print them out with two pages on a single sheet of paper.

It drives me crazy that most of the paper is white. I’ve got a complete history of printing on every page. There’s some whitespace for the binding. There some whitespace for the crack of the bound book. there’s some white space for the frame that holds the racks of little carved letters. I suspect there’s whitespace where the pages will get trimmed. There’s even some whitespace for the graphic designer’s love of whitespace. But really I’d like to read the text and it’s getting pretty small!

There must be some tool out there for gleaning off all that whitespace and sending it those less fortunate.

I learned years and years ago that you absolutely must clear the bytes in a file block before saving it to disk. If you don’t then sooner or later you’ll have a customer complain that your application revealed company secrets! This happens because they deleted the file with the salesmen bonuses in it and then the operating system hands your unsuspecting program the same file blocks without clearing them and then … well you get the idea.

While I hadn’t forgotten that design rule I seem to have forgotten until reminded today that if you should avoid certain byte values in file encoding. Why? Because if you use vertical tab or linefeed in the file encoding then when the customer prints the binary file to the line printer the printer consumes an entire box of paper. I wonder if the Java byte code takes that rule to heart?

While I don’t know the analogous rules are for files headed for the laser printer; but somebody around here has got a file that breaks them.

Old media + new media = ?