Random Thoughts

... Disaster has struck and the post I had spent a whole day on has vanished because of some incompatibility between Blogger and Microsoft SkyDrive embedding. I will try to recap the contents of that post briefly anyways. The original gcard style sheet is intended for making a small greeting card that gets folded twice, as shown in my previous post . I would like to modify the style sheet to produce a card that gets folded only once. It will have some content on the outside as well as inside. In addition, I want to add features like background image and other figures to make the cards more appealing. Going from a double fold to a single fold That requires that you make the following changes in the file gcard.sty. 1) Double the panel height. %\setlength{\panelheight}{(\paperheight-2\gctopmargin-2\gcbottommargin)/2} \setlength{\panelheight}{(\paperheight-2\gctopmargin-2\gcbottommargin)} 2) Push the inside pages to their respective location next page. %\begin{textblock*}{\panelwidth...

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 ...

Finding the right résumé template is quite painful for those of us who prefer to do things the more difficult yet elegant way. The alternative is to use LaTeX or XML. Preparing a LaTeX résumé style sheet (HowTos here ) from scratch requires more savvy that I have, not to mention the time and effort. So, I prefer to adopt some templates from the web and modify the pieces for my taste. Unfortunately, many issues arise when one considers the many templates out there. The PDFs generated using these templates do not get properly scanned by software used by hiring companies. That could very well mean the difference between getting hired or being rejected. I noticed this issue during the many times I submitted PDFs generated by 'pdflatex'. In a related issue, converting PDFs to text using 'pdftotext -layout file.pdf' does not produce a desirable text file. For one, the text wrapping is messy, so the text might have to be terminated at about 80 characters by adjusting t...