I’ve been printing a lot of research papers recently. These are things you just have to read in hard copy. Now I like to print them as optimally as possible, striking the right balance between minimal paper, minimal whitespace and maximal readability. For reasons beyond me at this early stage, these papers have ridiculously huge margins so simply printing 2 pages per sheet (2-up) wastes a lot of space and the font is shitty and small. You can try zooming but Adobe Reader is crap at this and I can never get the most efficient zoom; it chops bits off, not centred, etc.
The answer? I googled and was like “why didn’t I think of that?”. The solution was to do it on a Mac. The Preview application lets you “crop all pages”. You select the area you want, hit Cmd-I to bring up the inspector, then click that magical button. Now I’m enough of a Mac fanboy as it is, but after wasting at least 20 minutes stuffing around on Windows, I wouldn’t be exaggerating by saying this is a jaw-dropping feature.
Then just “print” yourself another PDF using Preview, this time in 2-up with 120% zoom or whatever and you’re done. Add this anecdote to the List of Reasons Macs are Preferred by Publishers, if that even is true.
P.S. Have I spruiked Google Scholar yet? I haven’t had to write a single BibTeX entry so far.
