Recently one of my clients contacted me asking if I could make a change. The task was to shrink huge margins on PDF delivery slips. The mission wasn’t easy because the settings were hidden in the files. You can change font size and amend or remove elements from the printout by modifying templates. Unfortunately, you can’t decrease the margin on PDF printouts.

Tesseract it’s a great library Open Source library to supply free OCR solutions for multiple libraries. You can use it directly from command line, or in your own software using supplied libraries.

Quite often we are looking for a quick way to make a request in GO, and we have working query tested in CURL. Sometimes it’s problematic to “move” all queries to GO, and build up whole query using client, protocol and so on.

From the author of my beloved Caddy server there is a tool called curl-to-Go which basically does what is says. Just paste your CURL request and GO lang code to implement that.

It’s a simple mechanic to decompose emails into valuable parts, like some markup (to push emails directly into internal systems), create file attachments and extract inline images.

Flow is pretty simple, but we have a couple of components.

1. We need something to “receive” emails. The easiest way is to use Amazon SES or mailgun or… something else. There are a couple of SASS solutions for that.
2. Next step is to be notified when the email arrives, so we don’t have overhead with checking email every couple of minutes
3. We have to “decompose” – decode email from it’s raw format to text, and attachments. We can achieve that using couple of existing libraries, but you get the idea
4. We have to save all data and expose it to public

So we know what to do and roughly how to do the whole process. Points 1 and 2 are pretty straightforward for anyone who uses AWS and their services.

People say that FTP is dead. But not everyone knows or can use SFTP, SSH whatever to update their website. Sometimes you just need something as simple as good old FTP server on your instance. Let’s do it.