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2013

Show old title bar in Thunderbird

This post is archived. It is left as is and won't receive updates.

With the latest release of Thunderbird 17, the menu bar and tabs are drawn into the title bar. On Windows XP, this then looks like the following:

New title bar in Thunderbird

In the default theme, the active title bar is blue. Thunderbird adds more stuff to the title bar which increases the blue area. This looks odd, and fortunately this can be configured. Go to Settings > Advanced > Config Editor (in the Advanced Configuration section).

Search for the setting mail.tabs.drawInTitlebar and change the value to false (e.g., by double-clicking on it). And voilà, much better:

Restored title bar in Thunderbird

Modifying the "New Child" sub-menu items in EMF

This post is archived. It is left as is and won't receive updates.

I was just looking into a way to adjust the text of the items in the "New Child" (the same applies to "New Sibling" as well) sub-menu of the generated editor with EMF. By default the items just show the type name of the element to create. Depending on your meta-model it might be necessary to add some more information in order to be able to see which feature the new element gets added (or set) to.

The available items are depending on the current selected element. The collectNewChildDescriptors(Collection<Object>, Object) method is called on the item provider of this element. The actions for those menu items are created inside your ActionBarContributor class (see generateCreateChildActions(Collection<?>, ISelection)), which is located in the editor project. The text for this action is determined by CreateChildCommand.getText(), which in turn calls getCreateChildText(Object, Object, Object, Collection<?>) of the corresponding item provider. The default case is implemented in ItemProviderAdapter.

There seem to be two approaches, depending on what your goal is.

  • in Mac OS
  • 2 min read

Reducing file size of a PDF on Mac OS

The file size of PDFs can become quite large, especially when scanning documents or documents containing images. Instead of sending large files, it is almost always recommended to reduce the file size. To do that, there are several ways. For example, there is an app called PDF Squeezer in the Mac App Store (in 2013: €3.59 or $3.99, more expensive today).

The same functionality can be achieved using Quartz filters in the ColorSync Utility. There is already one called Reduce File Size but it might lead to a blurry PDF. You can copy this filter and adjust the settings. However, I found custom filters in the Apple Support Community that work quite well.

  • Download the filters
  • Move the filters to ~/Library/Filters
  • Open your PDF with ColorSync Utility
  • In the bottom, choose the appropriate filter. There are several options starting with "Reduce to ..."
  • Click "Apply"
  • If you are satisfied with the result, save the file under a different file name (File > Save As).

Alternatively, you can place them into /Library/PDF Services/ instead. Besides the fact that the filters will be available to all system users, when exporting PDFs in Preview, you can select a filter directly in the dropdown under Quartz Filters.

If the filters don't work perfectly for your use, you can adjust the settings within the ColorSync Utility.

The original creator of the filters to be credited seems to be Jerome Colas according to this GitHub repository.

Updates to this blog post

  • December 2017: Uploaded the ZIP file to my own server, since the original link became unavailable.
  • 27.10.2024: Replaced ZIP file with link to GitHub repository to download filters