Appendix

About the Author

Kurt has been coined The Walking PDF Debugger by several of his regular clients. They are right. Many of his problem solving skills in the last 10 years involved troubleshooting PDF processing systems in the Printing and Prepress Industry.

Kurt is a professional with more than 20 years of experience in the industry. After working for nearly 3 decades with the same employer (who in the process had 4 different names due to company mergers) he decided to freelance.

When working with customers, he prefers to use Free and Open Source Software whereever it works best. He is a commandline addict. As operating systems he prefers unix-oid types like Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris, but he is just as familiar with Windows and its cmd.exe too. These preferences were not pre-determined from the start: up until 1998 he used Windows 95 exclusively. His first tentative adventures with Linux started in that very year. In 1999, still very much a newbie with Open Source, he became one the first users and beta testers of a new printing subsystem called CUPS (Common Unix Printing System). In the following years, CUPS very fast became the pre-dominant printing interface in the Linux and Unix world and has meanwhile been adopted and even acquired by Apple for Mac OS X.

Kurt’s “career” as an author of technical documentation started when he helped users with technical questions about printing in different internet forums and contributed written documentation to various FOSS projects, such as Samba, Linuxprinting.org and KDE.

He currently is the all-time top scorer on StackOverflow.com when it comes to some of his favorite topics:

• His answers tagged as “[pdf]” – Score, current
• His answers tagged as “[ghostscript]” – Score, current
• His answers tagged as “[imagemagick]” – Score, current

Kurt is available for contract work:

• Kurt’s LinkedIn Profile
• Kurt’s Xing Profile

Acknowledgements

This book would not exist without my customers. They were the ones who confronted me with problems, tasks and jobs that made me think of possible solutions and made me research stuff.

Also, it would not exist without the wonderful StackExchange and Stackoverflow platforms which draws together users and programmers, experts and interested people who ask questions, share solutions and discuss ideas.

Contributors

A number of people have sent me suggestions and corrections. I like to thank them all:

• Markus Wolf
• Adrian Pfeifle
• … (your name could be here if you notified me of anything you want to be improved, added or corrected in future releases of this book!)

Images

This eBook uses some images which were not created by myself. Here is a list:

• Chapter “How can I convert a color PDF into grayscale?”: The picture used in the demo PDF document for this chapter was made by Craig ONeal (“minds-eye”) who hosts some of his work at Flickr. This picture is licensed under “Creative Commons Atrributions 2.0 Generic” (attention!, not all of Craig’s pictures use this license!). I downloaded it from Wikimedia.org – See also here.