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Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

olivierpieters.be

41–50 of 223 posts

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#41
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I edit a genre fiction and we do all our layout in XeTeX. I picked it because it's the right tool for the job, and I don't know PageMaker. The colophon calls attention to it because I think it's helpful to tell others how you made something (typefaces, tools, etc.) rather than for nerd cred. https://www.aliterate.org/aliterate-page47.pdf The typefaces are Minion and Myriad.

When I copy text from your PDF it comes out all garbled. Does this happen to others as well? Is it intentional; some form of copy protection?

Huh, totally weird. Maybe it's an encoding issue? The character appear to be getting shifted by -39 (ex. c 143 ->D 104) I never noticed because I'm typesetting for print.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#42
post #36

In March 2014, I attended a conference in Atlanta. In the subway, some nice guy told me I had to make business cards for the conference. So I went to some kinko and asked: - How much for 250 business cards? - $69. - If I provide a PDF and just ask you to print and cut, can you do it for today? - Yes. - How much? - $39. Do you have the file? - Yes. It was a lie. I opened a new LaTeX document and typed this thing, than…

>some nice guy told me I had to make business cards for the conference why? are they checking for business cards at the entrance or something?

Every person you meet is going to ask what you do, that's the moment to hand over your card.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#43
post #4

Serious question: Is LaTeX used outside academia these days?

Yes, I am a lawyer with mind dyslexia and I often got into trouble for missing stuff on my letters or rearranging the letters of things like the other parties names or case numbers etc. So I use the LaTeX letter document class and import the other parties information from an adr file. That way I only have to type the darn thing once. I think I can automate more stuff on documents where I often make errors but I'm just getting started with LaTeX. It's been a big stress reliever for me.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I edit a genre fiction and we do all our layout in XeTeX. I picked it because it's the right tool for the job, and I don't know PageMaker. The colophon calls attention to it because I think it's helpful to tell others how you made something (typefaces, tools, etc.) rather than for nerd cred. https://www.aliterate.org/aliterate-page47.pdf The typefaces are Minion and Myriad.

When I copy text from your PDF it comes out all garbled. Does this happen to others as well? Is it intentional; some form of copy protection?

[deleted]

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#45

If you're going to go through all the trouble of typesetting a business card in LaTeX, you really ought to use Computer Modern Roman so that folks know you typeset it in LaTeX. (Related; resumes in CMR always have +10 credibility.)

I think this need not be the case. When creating this, I wanted it to look good and the way I wanted it. Not make it scream "LaTeX". For a CV, Computer Modern might be more apt since there's also more text on it. But again, why make it scream LaTeX if one can do it more subtle and make it more personal at the same time? Do note that I have a LaTeX PDF style CV as well, but it's not linked in the article (nor availabl…

> Do note that I have a LaTeX PDF style CV as well, but it's not linked in the article (nor available online).

any particular reason why? i for one would love to see it.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this need not be the case. When creating this, I wanted it to look good and the way I wanted it. Not make it scream "LaTeX". For a CV, Computer Modern might be more apt since there's also more text on it. But again, why make it scream LaTeX if one can do it more subtle and make it more personal at the same time? Do note that I have a LaTeX PDF style CV as well, but it's not linked in the article (nor availabl…

> Do note that I have a LaTeX PDF style CV as well, but it's not linked in the article (nor available online). any particular reason why? i for one would love to see it.

At the moment the code is pretty ugly and there's a bit of personal information (e.g. phone number) I don't want to post online. I might write a blog post on creating a custom CV, but that's for some time in the future ;) (not really sure when)

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#48
post #4

Serious question: Is LaTeX used outside academia these days?

FWIW, I prefer to use it (LaTex with Beamer) to make technical presentations at conferences. This[1] was my most recent output.

Though, I spent way too much time than I care to admit making those, especially tweaking the TikZ 'diagrams' (first time I tried) that can be seen later in the slides. I find it quite convincing.

I'm pleased with the end result.

[1] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/...

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#49
post #4

Serious question: Is LaTeX used outside academia these days?

Yes.

For example, I wrote "iOS and macOS Performance Tuning: Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, Objective-C, and Swift"[1][2] using LaTeX, and I think it came out rather well (Pearson has some pretty amazing LaTeX compositors that took my rough ramblings and turned them into something beautiful).

Quite a while ago, I also used TeX (not LaTeX, IIRC) as part of the typesetting backend of a database publishing tool for the international ISBN agency, to publish the PID (Publisher's International Directory). This was a challenging project. IIRC, each of the directories (there were several) was >1000 pages, 4 column text in about a 4 point font. Without chapter breaks. My colleagues tried FrameMaker first on a subset, they let it run overnight and by morning it had kernel-panicked the NeXTStation we were running it on. The box had run out of swap.

TeX was great, it just chugged away at around 1-4 pages per second and never missed a beat. Customer was very happy. The most difficult part was getting TeX not to try so hard to get a "good layout", which wasn't possible given the constraints and for these types of entries just made everything looks worse.

[1] https://www.pearsonhighered.com/program/Weiher-i-OS-and-mac-...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321842847/ref=as_li_tl?ie...

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