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
Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
141–150 of 223 posts
Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
#142Has anyone ever used QR codes on the business cards or store doors? It seems like a waste of space, you need to have a special app on your phone to read it. I think most people don't use that.
I use snapchat, it picks up QR. It's my default camera just in case I want to caption something.
Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
#143I bet Knuth wouldn't be happy to hear that LaTeX was used to design Business Cards
First, Knuth did TeX, Plain TeX, and was not the primary force behind LaTeX. Second, IIRC, Knuth did proudly use TeX to print dinner menu, invitations, or some such.
>Knuth did proudly use TeX to print dinner menu
That's hilarious. Any sources on that?
That man is incredible.
Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
So when there are large gaps between the words on a line, I should experiment with manual hyphenation until it looks better?
CSS3 has automatic hyphenation (hyphens: auto) which you can tweak with manual soft-hyphens (­), and there are client-side hyphenators (Hyphenator.js, Hypher) available as fallbacks.
This is nice to know! Still, unless the formatting is fixed (by distilling to PDF), there is no way to deal with the under and overflows that arise from an aggressive (and hence decent looking type setter).
Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
#145Earlier 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…
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.
Since you said you were editing this: Is "horribly familiar horribly familiar" a double typo?
Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Can't read QR code an android out of the box. You need to get 1 out of 100 applications from the app store, that competes for the one who can shows the most ads and be the least effective at decoding the picture. Are you saying that the iPhone camera can read QR code out of the box?
> You need to get 1 out of 100 applications from the app store, that competes for the one who can shows the most ads and be the least effective at decoding the picture. The ZXing Barcode Scanner doesn't show any ads. IIRC, they give it away for free because they want people to use their (open source, natch) barcode library. I've been very happy with it. This of course demonstrates a problem with the App Store model:…
Yeah, I find it so strange that the Google Authenticator setup includes a step to download a recommended 3rd-party scanner scanner, given that GA is pretty much the most important app security-wise you can install on the phone.
Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like a secret handshake. This comment could sound sarcastic but it's not. Even that marketing manager could be a nerd, and it would be awesome to find out.
FWIW, my $BOSS-2 had a PhD, loved LaTeX and even set one of our lower-level guys on writing all our company-internal docs in LaTeX. It actually worked out pretty well. I imagine that an obviously-LaTeX resume (look for the ligatures, the correct spacing between sentences vice after periods, the clean, consistent grey across the page, the bold, clean margins) would play especially well with him. As you might guess fro…
> vice after periods
Is vice Latin? It reminds me of pace (because of the "shape" of the word, haha), but I guess it means something akin to except?
Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the one hand, I tend to agree with you. I used LaTeX (with beamer) to make several slideshows over the past few years, and it seems safe to say that this is not the exactly the kind of thing that plays to TeX's strengths. On the other hand, there exist wizards who do things like this: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/134638/showcase-tex-... (check out the pink one with hearts; note that it uses random numbe…
That page’s examples are mostly a bunch of paragraphs of prose (that part, TeX is great at), some with fancy formatting that took significantly more effort than the equivalent effect in InDesign or QuarkXPress. The one with the Zapfino doesn’t bother using any alternate glyphs (arguably the main reason to ever use Zapfino). A few others are vector graphics projects that would be best done in Illustrator, Inkscape, or…
What I meant to say was that in the hands of the right person, it would be effective and productive, but since you're not particularly convinced by anything on that page, I think I'll have to concede this point. You win :)
Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> why make it scream LaTeX if one can do it more subtle and make it more personal at the same time? Because the point of a business card is to effectively signal your impressiveness.
Is LaTeX actually impressive to the average business client (i.e. someone without technical knowledge)?
Not impressive for someone without technical knowledge.
If the technical people have a specific university background they might be familiar with it, and then either hate it or love it.
It's a good tool for writing large documents but does not signal anything except personal tastes.
Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is Computer Modern much worse than, say, Times New Roman?
Computer Modern has a very high contrast of thick and thin strokes, and the axis of the strokes is completely vertical. This makes it very difficult to render on bitmap displays: you can end up with 3-pixel lines next to 1-pixel lines, and the optical compensations of antialiasing can't fix the visual appearance because most of the lines are orthogonal. These characteristics of the font are intentional: it's really a…
Okay, so you're not saying it's always hideous; you're saying it's hideous on screen. I think you're wrong even there: some of the screens that have come out in the last few years have resolutions near that of cheap inkjet printers, and on those screens Computer Modern looks okay. If you don't have access to such screens, there is a simple trick you can use instead: just set your zoom to something like 10x. The font looks glorious then, in my opinion. The one tiny problem is that nothing fits on the screen :)