Tag Archives: Tipbits/How to’s

Custom themes for PuTTY

This post has sat in my draft folder for more than 5 years. I was doing some cleaning and found that I didn’t publish this post and since it is still relevant I thought of pushing the publish button.

Being a web developer, most of the time I would be staring at PuTTY. I got sick of the default bright colours of PuTTY and was searching for ways to customize the display of my PuTTY window.

After some research, I found pre-packaged custom themes for PuTTY created by Ilya Grigorik. These themes are available as .reg files. You can directly download and use them or if you want, you can further customize them for your needs.

Below is the screenshot of the different themes that are available.

putty-terminals

Wow! now my eyes have something pleasant to stare at, most of the times 😉

Posted in Unix/Server Stuff, Web Programming | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Make Acrobat Reader load faster

I am a great fan of PDF documents and I am using Acrobat Reader right from version 4.0. But in the earlier versions I had only one complain. It used to take a long time for it to load. So I used to keep the main reader window open even if I am not reading a document so that then next time when I need to open a file I need not wait for it to load again.

But that has changed a lot in the latest version 7.0 of Acrobat Reader. Seriously Adobe has done some tweaks to make it load faster. But recently I found that it is loading lot of Plugin by default and a considerable amount of time can be reduced during loading if the optional Plugins are removed.

I was going through the installation directory of Acrobat Reader and found that there is an optional directory where we can put those Plugins which we do not want to load by default. This directory can be found in the following path (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\Optional) and the Plugin directory can be found in this path (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\plug_ins). I am assuming that you choose the default directory during installation. If you have installed it in a different directory then change the path accordingly.

The optional Plugins can be moved from the Plugin directory to the optional directory. Each Plugin can be identified but the extension (.api). But before doing that find out the Plugins which you are not going to use. You can see the list of Plugins and their dependencies in the Plugin’s page.

Click Help -> About Adobe Plugins.

areader1.GIF

You will see the following page.

areader2.GIF

From this page you can get a fair idea of Plugins that you don’t need and then move those corresponding .api files to the optional directory. While doing that please note that some Plugins may depend on other Plugins for loading. So if you get an error message stating that a particular Plugin was not able to load properly then restore the necessary Plugins. You will notice a significant improvement in the time taken for loading after moving the optional Plugins.

Here the list of Plugins which I have moved for your reference.

  • Accessibility.api – Acrobat Accessibility
  • Annots.api – Comments
  • AcroForm.api – Forms
  • MakeAccessible.api – MakeAccessible
  • Spelling.api – Spelling
  • soap.api – soap
  • Sendmail.api – Send Mail
  • reflow.api – Reflow
  • LegalPDF.api – Legal PDF
  • DigSig.api – Digital Signature
  • Multimedia.api – Multimedia
  • PPKLite.api – PPKLite
  • Updater.api – Updater
  • eBook.api – Adobe DRM
  • PDDom.api – PDCom
  • SaveAsRTF.api – Save as RTF
  • Checkers.api – Checkers

Posted in Windows/.NET | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments