Making of Stylus Email Signatures with Touch Devices Tutorial
Somewhere along the line with the mixed device goings on in yesterday’s Stylus Email Signatures with Touch Devices Tutorial‘s content consisting of …
- iPad screenshots emailed in two parts (ie. two separate emails)
- iPhone photographing iPad photos separately emailed
… we ended with huge image file sizes, albeit collected into the one directory and made alphabetically relevant to “our story” of the blog topic. How so? Well, macOS Preview app 99% of the time succeeds with you …
- highlighting all the relevant images in Finder app …
- two finger gesture Open With -> Preview …
- Export As PDF…
… and so does the “PDF presentation” trick for us … but not yesterday. It being really more than “99%” we wasted a good deal of time not believing it, especially as Preview appeared not to admit defeat in any way (ie. no error messages), just exporting the first image out of the fifteen we wanted in our PDF export requirement.
The Books app no better, on macOS, this is. So, what to do? Think laterally, think minimally, perhaps. How about (the usually pared down) “command line woooooorrrrrllllllldddd”? Yes, we’ve done it before, and it was easy … good ol’ ImageMagick and its brilliant command line …
convert [optionalSwitches] [imageSpec] [outputPDFname]
… for us in this set aside folder (on macOS Terminal app command line) …
convert -verbose *.* stylus_signature_email.pdf
… creating a 38mB stylus_signature_email.pdf … perhaps a hernia induced Preview reaction … and we’re all pretty shy about hernias … aren’t we?
Lesson two here is, fairly patently, try to reduce your image sizes ahead of exporting to PDF. JPEG images are good in this respect.
Previous relevant Stylus Email Signatures with Touch Devices Tutorial is shown below.
Stylus Email Signatures with Touch Devices Tutorial
Yesterday’s Stylus with Touch Devices Primer Tutorial got us thinking about an annoyance we have with modern life whereby it is still asked that you …
- receive forms online …
- and then are asked to sign these and email them back … the bugbear being …
- that form owner forbids electronic signing and so requires you to rescan the documents with your signature made by a pen
Now I’m not saying that there may not be a legitimate reason for this, amongst them being that we, the world, are definitely not yet anywhere near “au fait” with the various improving electronic signature functionalities out there. But it seems to me a bit juvenile to have a “blanket rule no” to “signatures on mobile devices via stylus annotated form filling”, as there are surely ways to know this is legitimate “real person” usage, or not.
But, did you know, on an iPad or iPhone, this procedure can be as simple as …
- receive forms online on an iPad or iPhone and download form images that need filling out and/or signing to Photos app …
- in Photos app Select these form photos to reply to this same emailer and annotate via Share -> Mail option’s top right Annotating icon
… - fill in and sign away with drawing options and your (perhaps recently discovered) stylus … and as you tap Done …
- email attachment includes your annotations as it wings its way back to the emailee as you tap the Send button/icon
Previous relevant Stylus with Touch Devices Primer Tutorial is shown below.
Stylus with Touch Devices Primer Tutorial
Are you a tablet or mobile phone user whose index finger of your favoured hand is suffering mightily?! Then this tutorial may be of interest.
We’ve avoided the idea for a long while of introducing a “stylus” into the mix of use with our iPad and/or iPhone (ie. works with touch devices). The brand we chose was Targus and their “slim stylus” for $12 (Australian dollars).
As you can see from today’s animated GIF presentation it is not only the tapping of icons that the stylus can help with, but “scribble” type drawing and signature functionality it can excel at.
We’ve found that using the stylus we move around the tablet or mobile phone quicker and more accurately than with our finger tap and touch work.
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