Comments on: Document Typesetting Fantasy http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=313 "no matter how gifted, you alone cannot change the world" Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:09:41 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Randall http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=313#comment-11296 Randall Thu, 11 Oct 2007 02:42:28 +0000 http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=313#comment-11296 At work, every so often we have to print up the names and comments of a few hundred thousand people who signed an online petition, grouped by state or Congressional district. Guess what we use to do it? Yup: LaTeX.

The details could get boring pretty quickly, and I think I even told you about this before, so suffice to say that: 1) TeX can typeset 20K+-page documents, no problem — I vaguely recall you might have to increase one of the built-in stack sizes but that’s it. 2) One of the craziest TeX-y projects was to break a petition into thousands of little PDF packets that people could print out and individually take to local Senate offices. 3) The LaTeX-generating Perl script has the distinction of having once crashed because I forgot about American Samoa (dangit!).

]]> By: Blake Stacey http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=313#comment-11289 Blake Stacey Thu, 11 Oct 2007 02:16:15 +0000 http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=313#comment-11289 I spent more time than I’d like to admit this afternoon figuring out why LaTeX was expecting \endcsname commands and generally barfing out error messages from the inscrutable bowels of TeX; once I got it, I figured the Internet should know, too.

]]> By: mollishka http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=313#comment-11287 mollishka Thu, 11 Oct 2007 02:03:43 +0000 http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=313#comment-11287 It’s like zephyr, only, muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch more polite.

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