Eddie's Fancy

Business Cards

It was a rainy day. A really, really rainy day. And the wife was out giving at talk at UH. So far after eating a bowl of cereal while watching Farscape I decided to design some business cards. It seemed the thing to do at the time.

Googling around for various card LaTex templates I finally found on adapted by John Vernaleo that was easy to modify and looked nice. It stole the idea of including a GPG fingerprint from another template I found included it on the bottom the card.

I spent sometime sitting on the couch browsing various designs and decided a logo was needed in the upper left corner to spruce thing up a bit. I tried my initials but they it seemed a bit plain. When my wife came home I asked how to write in initials in Bengali and came up with a simple design in The Gimp.

I printed a test page and the anti-aliasing on the fonts used for the logo didn’t translate very well. What I needed was a log in encapsulated postscript that used an outline font so it would print correctly at the small scale used for the card. Time for a new tool! Back to Google, I decided to try my hand at Inkscape. Not too shappy.

Export as eps and include in the file and…it looks like crap. I need to left align the logo but the table environment used to center the text didn’t work quite like I wanted. After much poking around I came across a suitable solution; a three column table with expanding space on the left and right, text in the center, and a three column spanning left-aligned top row with the logo. Not bad.

My hand-cut version weren’t quite straight enough but I had some Avery templates from a previous project. After a bit of adjusting I was able to fit them into the punch outs fairly cleanly. I considered making them two-sided, but I usually use the back of business cards for notes and decided to keep it empty. Not bad for a morning’s work.