LaTeX and PDF Tips

From the access logs it's obvious that the latex and pdf tips page (in Japanese) is one of the most popular contents besides my profile and seems like it's somewhat highly page-ranked by google, so I put here an English translation.

Equalize the Column Heights of the Last Page

flushend.sty is the most convienient way to equalize the heights of the last page of a 2-column pdf. Download it to the same directory as your .tex and do

\usepackage{flushend}

It's useful especially when you submit a paper to an IEEE conference (whose latex style shows you how to equalize the heights with super troublesome way).

Concatenate Two PDFs

pdftk command lets you concatenate two PDFs such as an abstract and a poster draft. Do as follows:

$ pdftk input_filenames output output_filename

Note that output is a command option, which you should put as-is.

Create a PDF with the US Letter Size

If you want to set the size of your PDF to US Letter (also referred as simply 'Letter' size) but you don't know how to tweak the style file, the paper option of dvipdfm (or dvipdfmx for CJK people) can help you.