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.)
I 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).
> 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
It 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.
I 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.
Huh, 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.
FWIW, 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!
Good point, I fear it could backfire in a business setting. Mind you, I'm a huge LaTeX fan, but the one study I'm aware of that compared the efficiency of Word and LaTeX for a couple of average writing tasks came to a pretty damning conclusion (see quote below). So, I'd argue that LaTeX is the right tool for long math-heavy texts under version control, while better tools exist for most other tasks.
> 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.
At 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)
Computer 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.
Computer 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.)
Okay, 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 :)
I suspect his problem is more with Windows and its brain-dead font rendering. Vertical strokes are the ideal case for subpixel anti-aliasing on a typical LCD: you get 3x the horizontal resolution. On a typical 100dpi screen this gives you 300dpi horizontal resolution, which is around the low-end for print quality. On modern 200dpi "retina" displays, you get 600dpi horizontal resolution which is more than enough to make Computer Modern look good. But ClearType has a strong preference for aligning positions and sizes to whole pixels, giving you horrendous kerning and sudden large jumps in font size and apparent weight as you increase the requested font size.
I'm using a Retina MacBook. The readability problem with Computer Modern is intrinsic to its design, and even a 200 dpi screen just isn't enough to make it look good (IMHO). But it's definitely much worse still on Windows.
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?
Why use it? It's the default, and otherwise you have to find a math font and text font that go together all on your own. At least that's why I use it: laziness.
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.
Times 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.
Computer 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.
On the one hand, I tend to agree with you. I used LaTeX (with beamer) to make several slideshows over the past few years, and it seems safe to say that this is not the exactly the kind of thing that plays to TeX's strengths.
On the other hand, there exist wizards who do things like this:
(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)
That page’s examples are mostly a bunch of paragraphs of prose (that part, TeX is great at), some with fancy formatting that took significantly more effort than the equivalent effect in InDesign or QuarkXPress. The one with the Zapfino doesn’t bother using any alternate glyphs (arguably the main reason to ever use Zapfino). A few others are vector graphics projects that would be best done in Illustrator, Inkscape, or similar. As you go down the list, the examples (like the thing with the hearts) start to be examples of tacky overwrought things slapped together by amateurs.
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.
What I meant to say was that in the hands of the right person, it would be effective and productive, but since you're not particularly convinced by anything on that page, I think I'll have to concede this point. You win :)
> TeX is not a productive or effective tool for making business cards or other heavily graphical documents.
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... :-)
This conclusion makes me wonder if they were measuring LaTeX users while they were writing a new type of document for the first time.
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.
You 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....
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.
I 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.
Me 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. :-)
