Skip to main content

LaTeX Greeting Cards

No, no, not that kind of latex. You are pretty sick for thinking that. I am talking about LaTeX, the typesetting program. Back to greeting cards.

Anybody else hate greeting cards? The type that you buy at the store, sign and deliver even though the message is very impersonal and superficial? Yeah, those kind. I hate them very much. Not only do I hate spending time trying to find something that's mildly personal, but I hate paying for them too. $3-5 on that garbage is a travesty. Jerry Seinfeld captures my feelings towards Hallmark cards perfectly in this clip:


or this one http://www.youtube.com/v/7tq-RE_6yVo

This problem has become significant enough for me to start working on solutions. I am going to make my own cards using LaTeX.

So, I googled "LaTeX greeting cards" and came across the the gcards package. It requires that you also install the textpos and graphicx packages, if you don't have them installed already. I am working with a Linux system here.

While the gcard style sheet is intended for a "two-fold" card, my idea of a greeting card is more of a "one-fold" type.

The original example given by the author George McBane produces something like this after I included the 'showboxes' option in the gcard package.
Upon folding in half twice, you get a small greeting card. I for one prefer the more majestic card that only folds once. So, I have to modify the package to do just that.

A brute force solution would be to
  1. Remove the 'showboxes' option for gcard,
  2. Specify the size of a minipage to be half a page instead of quarter of a page.
  3. Print the outer page to one file by specifying the content for the 'outercover' and 'backcover' sections and leaving the 'insideleft' and 'insideright' sections empty.
  4. Print the inside page to another file by specifying the content for the 'insideleft' and 'insideright' sections and leaving the 'outercover' and 'backcover' sections empty.
I successfully made a few cards using the brute force approach even though the process was not fun. A cleaner and more elegant solution came to me after I read more about the textpos package. The new approach is a subject of a new post.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Distribution of Wealth in the US

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I heard this statement quite a bit lately particularly in light of the sub-prime mortgage and general housing crisis in the US. The country has enjoyed significant economic prosperity and both Clinton and Bush boasted economic growth under their reign. Unfortunately, the beneficiaries of the economic boom are not people from all economic backgrounds, but rather the top 10%. To make things worse, Bush gave tax cuts mainly targeting the top 10%. Being more of a numbers guy, I always wanted showing the validity of the-rich-get-richer-n-the-poor-get-poorer statement. Thanks to Wikipedia , I have finally found it!! Both the mean and median net worth of families for the bottom 50% of the population has remained absolutely flat while the 75th-90th percentile see a decent growth and the top 10% enjoy the most appreciation on their net worth. So, if you factor in inflation, the-rich-get-richer-n-the-poor-get-poorer probably holds true. The g...
1 comment
Read more

IPtables, SVN, and NMAP

I reviewed some material on IPtables, SVN, and NMAP just for the sake of keeping my mind busy. Here are some useful notes: IPtables - best resource found at HERE SVN - best, as in the quickest and simplest intro could be found HERE NMAP - I honestly don't see in using it for more than port-scanning in a few instances. Anyway, here are a few other options that might come in handy at some point. nmap -sT/sS/ sX/sF/...[-P0] IPADDRESS(range) == to check which ports are open nmap -sP IPADDRESS(range) == a simple ping scan for availability nmap -sO IPADDRESS(range) == check what IP protocols are available nmap -sV IPADDRESS(range) == a scan with version detection Other useful flags: -O == detects OS, part of -v (verbosity) flag as well -A == detects OS and versions -v == request high verbosity/detail -F == performs a fast scan of only a few common ports Installing Perl modules Perl modules may be installed using the CPAN module or from source. SOURCE...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reasons to Vote for Barack Obama

Not that I am eligible to vote or anything ... but if I could, I would vote for Barack Obama for the following reasons. He listens to experts . He has assembled a group of smart and practical intellectuals to advise him on all sorts of topics. Hillary has her own agenda and ambition which appears to keep her from entertaining any "elitist" agenda. He is a good manager. The way he hired very intelligent people to run a nearly flawless campaign to beat an established and seemingly unbeatable opponent in Hillary Clinton is commendable. He really knows how to surround himself with a smart group of people who can get things done and that is exactly what this country needs. Hillary hired people on the basis of their loyalty and counted on friends of the Clintons to win her the nomination. Unfortunately, all that influence and political capital could not overcome the grassroots movement Obama initiated. He is not an ideologue . That allows him to make good decisions for this...
Post a Comment
Read more