Label & Card printing resources with TeX and LaTeX

Dec 08, 2010, 14:32 (0 Talkback[s])

[ Thanks to Roland for this link. ]

"Fans of OpenOffice, Abiword, and KOffice, and Scribus dominate the open source document printing discussion, because traditional office suites and desktop publishing apps account for the lion's share of the pages in our paper trays. But for a lot of old-school typesetters and writers, nothing in the WYSIWYG realm can hold a candle to the performance and flexibility of TeX, and its popular LaTeX and BibTeX derivatives. Although TeX is most often used to create structured documents like research papers, it can be used to generate any document type — including specialty items. For the unfamiliar, here are some resources for using TeX to print envelopes, labels, badges, and cards.

"A bit of background

"TeX, for those who have not used it, is a text-markup language. The markup syntax is different, but much like HTML, it uses special tags to designate emphasis, boldface, spacing adjustments, bulleted lists, footnotes, and all other sorts of typographic elements. But TeX is designed for printing, not on-screen display. It was created by computer science guru Donald Knuth to help him typeset The Art of Computer Programming, and it handles complex print-centric tasks like hyphenation, justification, and footnotes/end-notes with ease. It also has robust support for typesetting mathematical expressions, which makes it the de-facto choice of a variety of scientific journals."

Complete Story

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