[Tex/LaTex] Showcase TeX Typography for TUG’s Calendar

calendarcalligraphyexamplestypefacestypography

I'm making a calendar. The calendar will be for TUG, 2015. Last year I also made a calendar but because of time constraints most examples were graphics.

Since this is a lot of work, I need your help.

If you can/want to help out, the following are the requirements for contributions:

  • Your contribution should not exceed 1 page of A4 size, in landscape or A5 size, portrait orientation.
  • You should post your TeX solution as an answer to this question.
  • If possible, please provide a hyperlink to the pdf output document.
  • If you want to make your submission available for the calendar, you should make sure the document can be made available in a single page pdf that has a size that does not exceed A4/landscape. I will ask you for the pdf if I need it.
  • Your submission may use user-defined packages and proprietary fonts. There is no need to make these available.
  • Your submission should include a short description and a screenshot of the output.

The following template may be useful to get started.

% save this document as example.tex
% compile this document with: pdflatex -shell-escape example.tex
\documentclass{article}

% Needed to make sure your page dimensions
% are the same as that of the calendar.
\usepackage[landscape,a4paper]{geometry}

\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{external}

\pagestyle{empty}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}
\node[scale=10]{Your Art Here.};
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

Example of Output

  • On 4 October, 2013 I decided to relax my question and also accept showcases of typography.
  • On 12 November, I once more relaxed my question because I definitely don't have the time to make a tasty looking calendar on my own. There may be a prize for one or two submissions.
  • Springer are kindly donating two copies of LaTeX and Friends.
  • If there are enough submissions, I'll compile a calendar. Otherwise, I may have to cancel the project.
  • There have been too few submissions so I am cancelling the calendar for 2014. Peter Wilson has already implemented a TeX-based calendar so I don't see any real problem.
  • Nicholas Hamilton and ChrisS have won a copy of the book.

When the calendar is finished, I will post the code as an answer to this question. Hopefully, this will help people who want to do similar things.

FWIW I decided not to award my bounty (500) today (2014-02-14) as I'd like to raise the standard a bit.

Best Answer

Well someone has to go first.... !

Output

I have partially completed my PhD, and, use this on the inside cover of my submissions to add some 'artistic-flair', however, the source for the word-cloud is actually my BibTeX Database, so the cloud is relevant to each document, and, the sample above is effectively the last one that I produced.

In terms of methodology, the cloud itself was produced in R, via custom package, which I have written for this purpose. This custom package is more-or-less a convenience wrapper to the wordcloud package which is freely available.

To integrate it with LaTeX, I used knitr, however, this is simply to call the R package, which I have instructed to produce the result in .tikz format.

So here is the code to my solution:

\documentclass[a4paper,landscape,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[margin=0cm]{geometry}

%SETUP
\usepackage{fancyhdr,xcolor,tikz,helvet}
\renewcommand{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}
\pagestyle{empty}
\pagecolor{black!75}

\begin{document}
    %CREATE THE CLOUD
    <<MakeCloud,echo=FALSE,eval=TRUE>>=
      set.seed(1)
      suppressMessages(library(bibcloud))
      suppressMessages(library(tikzDevice))
      options(tikzDocumentDeclaration   = '\\documentclass[12pt]{article}\\usepackage{helvet}\\renewcommand{\\familydefault}{\\sfdefault}\n')
      suppressMessages(cloud(pattern    = "phd.bib",
                             dev        = "tikz",
                             output     = "WordCloud",
                             col.outer  = "#404040",
                             col.inner  = "#FFFFFF",
                             width      = 8,
                             height     = 8,
                             scale.small= 0.25,
                             scale.large= 4,
                             stem       = FALSE,
                             max.words  = 300))
    @

  %TYPESET THE CLOUD
  \begin{figure}[p]
    \centering
    \input{WordCloud.tikz}
  \end{figure}

\end{document}

The tikz file WordCloud.tikz, and the resulting pdf, can be found HERE.