azazil.net

Inspired recently by the ongoing buzz surrounding the TextMate editor, I bought the e-book TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac by James Edward Gray II from Pragmatic Bookshelf. If, like most people, you find reading e-books to be far less pleasant an experience than reclining with a dead-trees edition, this tip might make e-book reading more bearable for you:

First enable the gamma inversion shortcut:

1. Open the System Preferences dialogue from the Apple menu;
2. Select the Universal Access icon;
3. Make sure Enable access for assistive devices, at the bottom of any tab is checked.

Now you can flip the gamma curve to make black-on-white pdf documents display in white-on-black, which is much easier on the eye, and allows you to dim your display considerably lengthening the time until you next need to recharge. Try it now by pressing: Ctrl-Alt-Command-8 (the three keys to the left of spacebar on my macBook). To return to normal, press the same combination again.

The next trick is to configure Preview.app to display the pdf in a more book like manner:

1. Open your e-book with Preview.app;
2. Select Facing Pages, from Preview’s View -> PDF Display menu;
3. Select Slideshow, from Preview’s View menu, or press the Shift-Command-F shortcut;
4. You can also click the Expand Icon in the popup navigation bar to use every last inch of screen real estate;
5. You can flip pages back and forth with the left and right arrow keys, or click on hyper-links to navigate through the book;
6. When you’re done just press Escape to leave full-screen viewing.

What you end up with is actually quite readable on a laptop.

Incidentally: the book is rather good; What’s that? TextMate itself? What can I say… Farewell, cruel Emacs! :-)