Ten years ago, I was faced with the problem of printing serial numbers on 1000 computer-readable answer forms. This meant printing precisely-positioned black rectangles on every sheet. I thought about it for a moment and realized that the best tool for the job was TeX.

So I wrote a 10-line TeX document, adjusted the constants by printing a sample sheet and carefully measuring the position of the rectangles, and TeXed the result, making a 1000-page PDF that, when printed, produced exactly what was required.

Btw Luke, in your reply code or author code within comment.php you have it set to have an inline style which gives: “background-color: #FFFFDC;” to a div.

I would suggest adding “padding:5px” to that as well. Its been a pet peve of mine :P

@ Travis McCrea:

Glad I could help. :)

@ astine:

I’d like to think this would be easier to manage in the future. It’s a single file, and it generates a single PDF. File generation could get messy.

@ Chris Wellons:

It would work too. Although it is a bit of a “if your favorite tool is a hammer, you’ll be doing a lot of inventive nailing” type of approach. I figured that there is no way someone did not try to do this with LaTex before. The language is mature enough to have at least a few extensions and plugins for just about every occasion so there was no reason for me to reach for a hammer just yet. :)

@ astine:

Yup, that’s how I would have done it too. I’d stick a placeholder in the address location and have a script do a string replace on it for each letter.

huh… I would have jumped straight to Ruby to make a hundred nearly identical LaTeX files. This is cleaner.

You are a badass Luke…. and I am both ashamed that I have to keep being the guy who has to ask the stupid questions on LaTeX (I believe it was another question of mine which inspired the how to latex series), and happy that I can ask the questions that other LaTeX noobs have, but don’t know who to ask.

It does have a steep learning curve, but I am getting it.