Tiny leaves for official LaTeX announcements

15 Comments

Seth Godin mentioned in his recent blog post on simple typography that certain fonts remind us of something. I’m not a professional. But for to fun it, I tried to reproduce Seth’s first example using PGF/TikZ.

And here is the result (using LaTeX’s standard font Computer Modern).

tinyleaf

Below is the code. Just copy and paste the preamble and officialize pretty much anything!

Preamble

\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{positioning,decorations.markings}

\newcounter{leafs}

\tikzset{%
leaf/.style={/utils/exec=\setcounter{leafs}{0},
	decorate,decoration={
		markings,
		mark=at position 0 with {
			\draw [bend left=35,fill=black] (0,0) to ++(-0.3,0.02*\sign) to ++(0.3,-0.02*\sign);},
		mark=between positions 0.02 and 0.5 step 0.05 with {
			\draw [bend right=35,fill=black] (0.01*\sign,0.01*\sign) to ++(-0.2-\mult,0.3*\sign+\mult*\sign) to ++(0.2+\mult,-0.3*\sign-\mult*\sign);
			\stepcounter{leafs};},
  		mark=between positions 0.54 and 0.99 step 0.04875 with {
			\addtocounter{leafs}{-1}
			\draw [bend left=35,fill=black] (-0.01*\sign,0.01*\sign) to ++(0.2+\mult,0.3*\sign+\mult*\sign) to ++(-0.2-\mult,-0.3*\sign-\mult*\sign);},
	}
}}

\newcommand{\leaves}[1]{%
\setlength{\lineskip}{6pt plus 6pt minus 0pt}\lineskiplimit=\baselineskip
\def\mult{0.03*\theleafs}
\begin{tikzpicture}
	\node [align=center] (box) {\uppercase{#1}};
	\node [below left=of box] (ll) {};
	\node [above left=of box] (ul) {};
	\node [below right=of box] (lr) {};
	\node [above right=of box] (ur) {};
	\def\sign{-1}
	\draw [bend right=45, fill=black,postaction=leaf] (ul) to (ll) to ++(0.1,0.1) to [bend left=45] (ul);
	\def\sign{1}
	\draw [bend left=45, fill=black,postaction=leaf] (ur) to (lr) to ++ (-0.1,0.1) to [bend right=45] (ur);
\end{tikzpicture}
}

 
Document

\leaves{everything looks\\{\Huge official}\\{\tiny with tiny leaves around it}}

15 Comments

    • Hi Desmond,

      That’s a legitimate question, thanks!
      To scale the complete object, say to include it in another document, I suggest using the standalone document class and then graphicx to load it. PDFs are vector graphics and therefore perfectly scalable.

      \documentclass[border=10pt]{standalone}

      Scaling the leaves only (e.g. make them smaller and closer to the text) is a completely different question. Here is one possible way to do that by altering TiKZ units/constants:

      \begin{tikzpicture}[x=0.5cm, y=0.5cm, node distance=0.5cm]

      HTH,
      Tom

      Reply

  4. I’m trying to use it to do a titlepage, and its working well, except it will insist in putting todays date above the graphics. How do I stop that please?

    Reply

    • tom

      Great! I assume you are using maketitle. To omit the date, just leave it blank. Best, Tom.

      \documentclass[11pt]{article}
\begin{document}

\title{A fancy title}
\author{This is me}
\date{}
\maketitle

\end{document}
      Reply

  5. I’ve tried what you suggested but its still showing me todays date above the graphics, this is the relevant section of my foo.tex header code

    \end{tikzpicture}
}
\maketitle
\leaves{ Universal Hormones\\2014\\{\tiny Sharon Kimble}}
\hypersetup{
  pdfkeywords={},
  pdfsubject={},
  pdfcreator={Emacs 24.4.50.19 (Org mode 8.2.6)}}
\begin{document}
%\maketitle
\clearpage

    Nowhere do I define author, title, date except in the \leaves line, so where is it picking the date from, because “date” is not mentioned at all in the header code or anywhere else when it come to that!

    Reply

    • tom

      A few things:

      • Today’s date is produced by default when using \maketitle. Omit the date using \date{}.
      • I assume you define \title in your preamble. I get an error when using \maketitle without a \title definition.
      • Since the title and author name are part of \leaves, I don’t see why you’d need \maketitle, just remove it which should resolve the problem.
      • The command \leaves (and \maketitle) go after \begin{document}, it’s part of the content.

      HTH, Tom

      Reply

      • That’s sorted the date thanks, but now \fancyhdr has put a horizontal line above the graphics, so how do I get it not on the cover [page 1], but on every other page please?

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