LaTeX coffee stains | Hacker News Reader

LaTeX coffee stains

hanno-rein.de

154 pointsshard17 comments

I've been trying to think how to express my fascination with this software.

The only thing I can think of, is that this piece of ingenuity would never exist in a post apocalyptic future where humans have evolved into exacting machines.

This software is, in this sense, a win for humanity.

I resent your speciesism insinuating that simply because you are born human, you are somehow superior to machines.

Nice that Rein didn't cop out and embed images. I'm a little surprised that adding arbitrary closed outlines to PostScript output was the most straightforward way to do it. I would think you could algorithmically mask out a portion of an ideal ring (because the cup wasn't resting flat and saturation across the rim wasn't even).

I also didn't realize until now that DVI can only natively encode characters and aligned rectangles in black, and that's why so much TeX work requires PostScript support downstream.

Nice. I'm getting flashbacks of the time I managed to get a big coffee stain on one of the pages of my application to MIT. This was at the post office, minutes before the final deadline >.<

I simply wrote "sorry!" right by the stain, and mailed it off. I've no idea what influence this might've had, but it didn't seem to hurt since I got accepted anyway :)

Those aren't very convincing coffee stains.

I think what we really need is a coffee stain plotter.

It it like a coffee vending machine that overflows the cups?

I think it would have a bit more precision.

Some people would like intricate coffee stain patterns, me thinks.

Those of us who unwittingly leave coffee stains, tend to leave more than one and at different concentrations (color of stain) so I'd like to see a bit more complexity in the image...

Reminds me of the U of Chicago Physics prof who took an interest in coffee stains. I believe he even has a full font of coffee stains; perhaps that could be the next step.

http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/ring-around-t... for public article about the research and http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rddeegan/PDF/Coffee_Rings_1_n... for the Nature article about it.

As is, this addition to LaTeX is a bit redundant for me... all papers I have soon enough have this feature anyways.

Sid Nagel (experimental) and Tom Witten (theoretical)

Papers http://jfi.uchicago.edu/~tten/Coffee.drops/ News https://mrsec.uchicago.edu/research/nuggets/coffee/stories.h...

Computer Modern & coffee stains. What a beautiful combo :-)

Interesting. I hope there will be an option for tea stains (and especially for Lapsang souchong or strong Assam) in this document class.

Clearly the next thing we need is a package to add blood, sweat, and tear marks.

Or furiously scribbled, illegible notes from your advisor.

What's the appeal of coffee-stains on documents? Anyone care to explain?

Fuck, I can't upvote more than 10 times. Deserves lots more. The intro text pwns any "awesome intro text" I've ever seen.

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