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.)
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).
https://www.aliterate.org/aliterate-page47.pdf
The typefaces are Minion and Myriad.
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
Because the point of a business card is to effectively signal your impressiveness.
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.
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!
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?
So apparently what was meant is
correct spacing between sentences instead of after periods
If the technical people have a specific university background they might be familiar with it, and then either hate it or love it.
It's a good tool for writing large documents but does not signal anything except personal tastes.
> LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
any particular reason why? i for one would love to see it.
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.
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.
> 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
Edit: thank you! Glad you like it.
Edit 2: sources at https://github.com/kaeluka/cv
But the +10 credibility is absolutely true. It's like CS grunge style: when you wear ugly clothes, you look more authentic.
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.)
My question is: why use this particular 1980s font developed to showcase a dead-end stroke rendering technology, when there are much better alternatives around?
I agree at 200dpi is not quite enough for Computer Modern. But I claim that, say, 7200dpi is far more than enough, and then it looks great.
Handy link (because it's actually quite hard to find): http://concentriclivers.appspot.com/LatinModernTTFHinted.7z
Seriously, there are many places (CS publishing) where there are biases against papers written in Word.
Source: wrote a psychology PhD in LaTeX.
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.
I'd hardly put Computer Modern in anywhere near the same category.
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 Renaissance-style typeface with AMS Euler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMS_Euler
Or Lucida Math, https://tug.org/store/lucida/opentype.html
If you prefer Times, try MathTime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathTime TM Math http://www.micropress-inc.com/fonts/tmmath/tmmain.htm or STIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIX_Fonts_project
For replacement fonts I also like Palatino
Maybe I just wasn't clear enough on that part, in which case I sincerely apologize for my poor communication skills.
I thought I was pretty clear, but I guess not. Makes me really wish HN had a more forgiving window for editing comments, but oh well.
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 numbers so it doesn't even come out the same way each time, try doing that with anything but TeX (just don't ask why you'd want to); there's also one other that also used random numbers)
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.
Agreed. See the study "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development" which concludes
"LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users."
The study does claim though that LaTeX users had more fun while doing worse work, so there's that... :-)
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
My experience has been that once a given type of document has been written and tweaked to your satisfaction in LaTeX, the next time you write that type of document, you can just reuse the previous document as a template and not have to tweak much at all.
The first document does tend to require lots of tweaking, I'll grant that, especially if you're doing anything unusual that isn't covered by an existing LaTeX package.
Another thing that makes a big difference with LaTeX is the tools that are used to write it. If the "expert LaTeX" authors were writing LaTeX completely by hand, with no aid from any specialized tools, then that would explain their many mistakes. The use of advanced tools like the various LaTeX packages for vim and emacs make writing LaTeX documents a lot more streamlined and less error-prone.
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.
But I did throw a \LaTeX macro in the skills section, so anyone familiar LaTeX should notice.