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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.
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