Designing a Business Card in LaTeX • Hacker News Board

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#61

Post by twblalock » Sat, Feb 11, 2017, 11:42 PM UTC

zzleeper wrote: post #6

TwoBit wrote: post #4

Serious question: Is LaTeX used outside academia these days?

Hell, even in academia people hate it =\

I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Most of the academics I know hate it. They use it because certain journals require it, or their advisor makes them use it.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#62

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sat, Feb 11, 2017, 11:45 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #58

NelsonMinar wrote: post #28

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.)

That's why I always install CMR in MS Word. Handy link (because it's actually quite hard to find): http://concentriclivers.appspot.com/LatinModernTTFHinted.7z

Word kerning and hyphenation still sucks, so -10.

Seriously, there are many places (CS publishing) where there are biases against papers written in Word.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#63

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sat, Feb 11, 2017, 11:49 PM UTC

rev_bird wrote: post #34

TwoBit wrote: post #4

Serious question: Is LaTeX used outside academia these days?

I'm finishing up a 350+ page family history book that I wrote in LaTeX; I've got two or three more to go, and I wouldn't consider using anything else. It's got its quirks, but it was so easy to work with page formatting, footnotes/endnotes, and sections that it made up for all the fiddly issues I ran into with images. I have also been using the genealogytree[0] package (which relies on TikZ, coincidentally used by OP…

I thought my Latex CVs were great, but my wife always does better in...Illustrator out of all programs.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#64

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sat, Feb 11, 2017, 11:52 PM UTC

DonaldFisk wrote: post #21

I made mine using LaTeX for VL/HCC 2016. It's on http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/blog/VLHCC2016.html I repeated enough times to fill a page, printed it, and cut the cards.

Nice environment! But...why do justified on a webpage?

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#65

Post by rangibaby » Sat, Feb 11, 2017, 11:52 PM UTC

Looks nice but:

Hex colors don't map to CMYK at all. Your printer may be able to use a non-CMYK color using a special ink but that may cost more.

There are no crop marks or bleed. You'll want to add them.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#66

Post by pavlov » Sat, Feb 11, 2017, 11:53 PM UTC

NelsonMinar wrote: post #28

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.)

Computer Modern is a hideous font. It's particularly terrible when rendered in Postscript/PDF, which is how almost all documents produced with it actually get read.

But the +10 credibility is absolutely true. It's like CS grunge style: when you wear ugly clothes, you look more authentic.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#67

Post by ptrptr » Sat, Feb 11, 2017, 11:59 PM UTC

Let's put it that way - Patrick Bateman would not be impressed by this design, otherwise commandable effort!

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#68

Post by graycat » Sun, Feb 12, 2017, 12:07 AM UTC

I've done all my business cards in TeX, just Plain TeX, not LaTeX, for years.

It's just a simple TeX exercise.

I have the spacing so that the printing goes to some standard card stock for business cards with the positioning just right. Then bending the printed card stock results in a stack of business cards. Works great. Simple.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#69

Post by grzm » Sun, Feb 12, 2017, 12:08 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #63

rev_bird wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm finishing up a 350+ page family history book that I wrote in LaTeX; I've got two or three more to go, and I wouldn't consider using anything else. It's got its quirks, but it was so easy to work with page formatting, footnotes/endnotes, and sections that it made up for all the fiddly issues I ran into with images. I have also been using the genealogytree[0] package (which relies on TikZ, coincidentally used by OP…

I thought my Latex CVs were great, but my wife always does better in...Illustrator out of all programs.

In my experience there's a lot of layout that's been done in Illustrator. I suspect it's because of how long Illustrator's been around and had pretty good layout support, especially when compared with the early years of Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress and other tools. Illustrator was needed to do a lot of graphics work that these other tools didn't support, so it can make sense to do as much as you can in a single tool. If you can get good results doing everything you need in terms of text handling in Illustrator, why take the time to use a DTP application when you're likely going to need to use Illustrator anyway for graphics work.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#70

Post by arca_vorago » Sun, Feb 12, 2017, 12:13 AM UTC

TwoBit wrote: post #4

Serious question: Is LaTeX used outside academia these days?

As a sysadmin I use it, though to be fair most often in the form of emacs org-mode export to latex because I like the way it makes stuff look (so I'm not editing in latex unless I need to for some reason, which you can do in snippets inside org mode). Resumes, and anything I want to be formal such as latters and invitations I also use it for.