10 ms·
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 type
by NelsonMinar 10y ago
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.)
- opieters 10y agoI 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 available online).
- bhickey 10y agoI 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 https://www.aliterate.org/aliterate-page47.pdf The typefaces are Minion and Myriad.
- eriknstr 10y agoWhen 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?
- bhickey 10y agoHuh, 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.
- andrewshadura 10y agoI 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jimhefferon 10y agoDon't know about the parent's intentions, but making the PDF from LaTeX copy-able is mostly a matter of putting this in the preamble. \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} See also http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/64198/121234 http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/64198/121234 and http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/119718/121234 http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/119718/121234.
- adrienne 10y agoPageMaker has been dead software for like 10 years now, fwiw. InDesign is the modern replacement.
- geeio 10y agoI enjoyed that snippet, what is it from?
- ulrikrasmussen 10y agoSince you said you were editing this: Is "horribly familiar horribly familiar" a double typo?
- jessriedel 10y ago> 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.
- cderwin 10y agoIs LaTeX actually impressive to the average business client (i.e. someone without technical knowledge)?
- gumby 10y agoIt'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.
- wtbob 10y agoFWIW, 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 from the preceding sentence, it'd probably play pretty well with me, too!
- mrkgnao 10y ago> 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?
- yorwba 10y agoI found a definition that fits https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vice#Derived_terms_2 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vice#Derived_terms_2 So apparently what was meant is correct spacing between sentences instead of after periods
- irfansharif 10y ago> Do note that I have a LaTeX PDF style CV as well, but it's not linked in the article (nor available online). any particular reason why? i for one would love to see it.
- opieters 10y agoAt the moment the code is pretty ugly and there's a bit of personal information (e.g. phone number) I don't want to post online. I might write a blog post on creating a custom CV, but that's for some time in the future ;) (not really sure when)
- jilljennV 10y agoMy two cents using pandoc, LuaLaTeX (or XeLaTeX) and few TeX hacks. http://jill-jenn.net/résumé.pdf http://jill-jenn.net/résumé.pdf
- Manozco 10y agoIf you want to see one in LateX, here is mine: http://manu.vives.fr/ http://manu.vives.fr/
- nextos 10y agoExactly. Good TeX should simply yield to good typography. Nice ligations, etc. I dont like Computer Modern too much. I am very fond of Gentium [1]. For math, I love Euler [2], which is used in Concrete Mathematics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentium [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler
- kzrdude 10y agoDoesn't Euler look a tad cartoony to you? I guess that goes away when you are used to it.
- nextos 10y agoIt does. It is intended to mimic handwriting in blackboards. I use it for slides when teaching or presenting to informal audiences. If you don't like it, a good alternative to Computer Modern is Latin Modern. A nice derivative which is not so thin. Reading long Computer Modern texts gets a bit tiring for my eyes. I think some editors like LyX default to Latin Modern instead of Computer Modern. Aside, The Art of Prolog uses an amazing Lucida variant. It'd be my favorite for math texts if it was free.
- kaeluka 10y agoI like Gentium. Thanks for the tip! > Good TeX should simply yield to good typography. Making it look like tech can make it appear like you're one of the in-crowd. Although I personally try to avoid exactly that, I can see it being an advantage in -- for example -- CVs. Fwiw, my CV is also done in LaTex. I hope it doesn't show too much: http://stbr.me/cv http://stbr.me/cv
- zeamaize 10y agoThen why do it in TeX as opposed to Inkscape?
- kashyapc 10y agoMe nods. I clicked on it with a 100% expectation to see Computer Modern Roman (CMR) font, only to be surprised. Not that I was repulsed with what I saw. Still nice, but I'd have also posted a variant with CMR. :-)
- IshKebab 10y agoThat'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 http://concentriclivers.appspot.com/LatinModernTTFHinted.7z
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoWord kerning and hyphenation still sucks, so -10. Seriously, there are many places (CS publishing) where there are biases against papers written in Word.
- maverick_iceman 10y agoVery true. I'm unlikely to take an arXiv article seriously if it hasn't been typeset in LaTeX.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- disgruntledphd2 10y agoAnd yet, in other disciplines, Word is the standard and you get very, very strange looks if you use anything different. Source: wrote a psychology PhD in LaTeX.
- apricot 10y agoIsn't using LaTeX instead of Word in the DSM-5 already, right next to vi and Linux?
- disgruntledphd2 10y agoFortunately, there's no entry for emacs, so I guess I'm safe for now....
- andrewshadura 10y ago
- pavlov 10y agoComputer Modern is a hideous font. It's particularly terrible when rendered in Postscript/PDF, which is how almost all documents produced with it actually get read. But the +10 credibility is absolutely true. It's like CS grunge style: when you wear ugly clothes, you look more authentic.
- marvy 10y agoHow is Computer Modern much worse than, say, Times New Roman?
- kijin 10y agoTimes New Roman often means that you created the document with an old version of Microsoft Word (before Calibri became the default) and never bothered to customize anything.
- pavlov 10y agoComputer 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 showcase for Knuth's Metafont system which lets you tweak stroke contrast to a high level, so you can create many weight and casing variations of Computer Modern parametrically. And it does look bearable in print. But it's really the worst possible screen font. Times is much better in this respect because it was designed for readability long before computers, for newspaper printing where unexpected ink bleed and other artifacts were daily routine. (Cynically, it's possible to view Computer Modern as a fitting portrait of computer science itself: the font is used because it's exciting to have 62 tweakable parameters in a system designed by someone famous in the field, not because it's any good for the end users.)
- marvy 10y agoOkay, 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 :)
- jacobolus 10y agoComputer 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 point of TeX is to handle standard typesetting of structured prose and mathematical notation. Any time you need flexible layout control, TeX turns into more trouble than it’s worth. Someone using a dedicated graphical page layout or vector graphics tool is going to make a better business card (or poster, or flyer, or diagram, or ...) in less time, in a way which is much easier to modify later.
- yellowapple 10y agoCompared to Times New Roman? Arial/Helvetica? Calibri? Comic Sans and Papyrus? I'd hardly put Computer Modern in anywhere near the same category.
- jacobolus 10y agoYou 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_Math https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambria_(typeface)#Cambria_Mat... Personally I like Minion, http://www.typoma.com/en/fonts.html http://www.typoma.com/en/fonts.html Or combining some kind of Renaissance-style typeface with AMS Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler Or Lucida Math, https://tug.org/store/lucida/opentype.html https://tug.org/store/lucida/opentype.html If you prefer Times, try MathTime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathTime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathTime TM Math http://www.micropress-inc.com/fonts/tmmath/tmmain.htm http://www.micropress-inc.com/fonts/tmmath/tmmain.htm or STIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIX_Fonts_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIX_Fonts_project
- 10y ago
- sneak 10y agoIt was this very reason that I used the CMR webfont to typeset my Jekyll blog (https://sneak.berlin https://sneak.berlin). It's sort of a nerd shibboleth.
- joezydeco 10y agoI'll take the opposing view. When I see a resume in CMR I get the signal that the applicant still has their head in academia. That can be good or bad, in my particular field it's not that great.
- jlardinois 10y agoI typeset my resume in LaTeX, but I ended up formatting it so it looked almost exactly like it did in Word. I should probably update that at some point. But I did throw a \LaTeX macro in the skills section, so anyone familiar LaTeX should notice.