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Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

olivierpieters.be

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Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#131

Post by jacobolus »

marvy wrote: post #107
jacobolus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer Modern is now one of the most overused typefaces on the planet. It looks great for that “Victorian-era American-style math paper” look. People should mostly avoid it otherwise, IMO. There are plenty of better alternatives for typesetting pretty mathematics. * * * More generally about the thread here, TeX is not a productive or effective tool for making business cards or other heavily graphical documents. The…

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 similar. As you go down the list, the examples (like the thing with the hearts) start to be examples of tacky overwrought things slapped together by amateurs.

Obviously TeX is an extremely flexible system, and it’s possible (fun even!) to use it for all kinds of purposes it wasn’t designed for. Analogously, it would also be possible to write a web application in assembly code running on an Arduino. I said it wasn’t a very effective or productive tool for the job, not that it wasn’t possible.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#132

Post by ci5er »

jakobegger wrote: post #20

These are really beautiful business cards. But man, does anybody actually get value out of their business cards? No interesting opportunity has ever come up for me as a result of sharing business cards. At some point I stopped taking them with me. I still have a bunch of them in my desk drawer, they're very outdated, and I only use them for grocery lists. Is that just me, or are business cards going out of fashion in…

I'm guessing that you don't live in Japan. There, opportunities may or may not come after you have executed your card exchange, but don't leave home without them.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#133

Post by haddr »

jacobolus wrote: post #129
yellowapple wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to Times New Roman? Arial/Helvetica? Calibri? Comic Sans and Papyrus? I'd hardly put Computer Modern in anywhere near the same category.

You managed to name a bunch of typefaces which are even less suitable for tasks where someone might use Computer Modern (Times is comparable). I’m not sure what that proves.... Instead of Calibri, the Microsoft-provided typeface to use for mathematics is Cambria, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambria_(typeface)#Cambria_Mat... Personally I like Minion, http://www.typoma.com/en/fonts.html Or combining some kind of Rena…

Spot on. I laughed on every single font. Each one actually has a long story on abuse.

For replacement fonts I also like Palatino

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#135

Post by geeio »

bhickey wrote: post #37
opieters wrote: post #33

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…

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.

I enjoyed that snippet, what is it from?

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#136

Post by [deleted] »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #120
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word kerning and hyphenation still sucks, so -10. Seriously, there are many places (CS publishing) where there are biases against papers written in Word.

Very true. I'm unlikely to take an arXiv article seriously if it hasn't been typeset in LaTeX.

[deleted]

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#138

Post by a_e_k »

user5994461 wrote: post #97
joemi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an iOS user, I always assumed QR code reading was just built into Android's camera app. Is that not so?

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?

There actually is a first-party app from Google that can read QR codes: Google Goggles. Besides QR codes, I've also found it handy for scanning the ISBN bar codes of books that I want to remember.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#139

Post by TranquilMarmot »

wycx wrote: post #112
aw3c2 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite get why LaTeX is special here. You could have done the same in Inkscape, Word or whatever other text stuff related program.

Even better, you could layout with Inkscape AND typeset the text with LaTeX using textext: https://bitbucket.org/pitgarbe/textext

This is so silly and yet so awesome. I might actually use it in the future.

Re: Designing a Business Card in LaTeX

#140

Post by andrewshadura »

bhickey wrote: post #41
eriknstr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you need to use some PDF package to have the encoding set correctly. I had the same issue in the past, but I don't remember how I solved it.
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