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Friday Fun Thread for January 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I once worked (late 00’s) at an architectural plans copy/scanning shop where they manually renamed the scanned PDF files by opening them in Adobe Reader, closing the file, and renaming the file. Sometimes they didn’t rename them by page name (M3, E24, etc) and just renamed them 001, 002, 003, etc., which saved time, but since the scanner didn’t flip the pages, they were always last page first and people would lose count.

I scanned mine as TIFFs, opened them in Irfanview, and renamed them there. Then I did batch conversions to PDF. I was so fast. Since the files were sequential in reverse, I could rename them in backward order with batch renaming.

Since the other guys didn’t want to learn IrfanView, I set up a batch file to reverse-rename them. It worked, but the final file was always numbered 200 and the first was somewhere over number 1.

So I did what any reasonably smart programming-trained DOS-user would: I wrote a BASIC program to generate nearly identical reverse-renaming batch files for 5 to 500 pages, and also generated a 495-line “chooser” batch file to pick the right one based on if file 500 existed, file 499, 498, etc. Then I added it to the shell:sendto menu so all they’d have to do is right click the last file and send it to the renamer.

In my next job, also document scanning, I created all sorts of image conversion and PDF manipulation scripts, storing their shortcuts in shell:sendto. By the end of that job, my sendto menu was taller than the screen.