[HN Gopher] LaTeX Coffee Stains (2021) [pdf]
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LaTeX Coffee Stains (2021) [pdf]
Author : zahrevsky
Score : 261 points
Date : 2026-01-07 14:46 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ctan.math.illinois.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (ctan.math.illinois.edu)
| kasane_teto wrote:
| How nice.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| Interesting way to apply a water mark
| alansaber wrote:
| Coffee mark*
| Zigurd wrote:
| Brilliant! And people say Lucent overpaid for their logo.
| spudlyo wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned how pleasant it is to
| create coffee stains using Typst, and if only LaTeX wasn't the
| de-facto standard in academia and stain-related journals, they
| would have already switched to it.
|
| Of course, you can create coffee stains in HTML as well, but it's
| not something you can do in Markdown.
| fourthark wrote:
| Thankfully there is a Typst port of this package!
|
| https://typst.app/universe/package/fleck/
| philistine wrote:
| That package still has the core limitation of Typst: images
| can only be placed top-middle-bottom and left-centre-right.
| Typst still has yet to support arbitrarily placed images.
| doerig wrote:
| You mean absolutely positioning it? You can do that with
| the place function and displacing it with dx/dy from the
| origin (https://typst.app/docs/reference/layout/place).
| Example: #place(top + left, dy: 2cm, dx: 4cm,
| image("image.png"))
| mrichman wrote:
| I came here to say this! I switched to Typst a couple of months
| ago and won't be going back.
| alexitosrv wrote:
| Typst requires a signup? It's web? It says developed in the
| open, but the main page also offers a login. What can you about
| latex vs typst?
| quantummagic wrote:
| Typst is an application you can use on your local machine
| without any signup. The compiler is hosted on GitHub. The
| Typst web app (the online editor at typst.app) is closed
| source and offered as a paid with cloud storage,
| collaboration, autocomplete, etc...
| _flux wrote:
| The financial aspect of the project is the service they sell,
| core is open: https://github.com/typst/typst
|
| What the core lacks is the web service that offers e.g.
| collaborative editing.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| No. Typst is an open source application.
|
| There is a very prominent web site that offers a hosted
| version without much clarity about the fact that you can run
| it yourself. The hosted version offers collaborative editing
| similar to what Overleaf provides which is incredibly useful.
|
| See https://github.com/typst/typst for the CLI version
|
| There is a page with pre-compiled binaries as well and on
| Macs, you can install using homebrew.
| buo wrote:
| The compiler is open-source and can be run locally. You need
| an account if you want to use their web editor, which is nice
| (it shows error messages where they occur along with an
| explanation and link to docs, and also shows a real-time
| updated preview).
|
| As for Latex vs Typst, as a language Typst is much better,
| compiles very quickly, and has sane error messages. However,
| Typst still has a few rough edges, and can't do everything
| you can with Latex + packages (yet).
|
| I've been using Typst for most of my documents for a few
| months and I've been generally happy with it.
| kzrdude wrote:
| You can start using typst by installing it using rust tooling
| (that's one way to install it): `cargo install typst-cli`
|
| Or install it using vscode's extensions, or install it for
| neovim using mason. That's a few commonly used distribution
| paths.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I've been rewriting all my papers in Rust. It's been a pleasant
| experience getting memory safe coffee stains on my papers.
| anu7df wrote:
| Does coffee accelerate rusting?
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Depends on the acidity.
| asimeqi wrote:
| The best coffee stains by far are created directly in
| Postscript.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| I'd say the best ones are created by coffee...
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Hanno's original coffee ring page from 2009.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20100719202509/http://hanno-
| rein...
| jbrnh wrote:
| There was the GIMP Coffee stain filter (though it looks like
| it is not included in Gimp 3).
| https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/script-fu-coffee-stain.html
| zippyman55 wrote:
| This looks like the old Lucent Technologies corporate logo. This
| would have been handy back in the day.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Dogbert's "Brown ring of quality."
|
| Good times.
| ravila4 wrote:
| This looks nice, but it is just placing some pre-defined vector
| files. I wonder if it could be possible to procedurally generate
| realistic coffee stains.
| ted_dunning wrote:
| Absolutely!
|
| Go for it!
| Rygian wrote:
| Feature request: even/odd page stains that line up exactly as a
| single thru-stain.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| slightly fading for each page.
| blitzar wrote:
| Page reordering for the inevitable large scale spill and
| hurried cleanup.
| kubb wrote:
| Not drinking coffee is the only reason I've ever felt truly
| excluded at a software company. Everyone loves their coffee!
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm in the same boat; I can pretend with tea but it's not
| really the same experience.
|
| Diet soda sometimes works, but often isn't provided as easily.
| nitnelave wrote:
| You need to go all-in on tea and make your own mark. Get a
| fancy Chinese teapot with holes in the spout to use loose leaf
| tea, and start getting snobby about traditional vs modern
| techniques of Pu'er tea, and you'll get your own brand of
| respect!
| pdpi wrote:
| Everybody knows that coffee stains are the only surefire way to
| tell whether a paper has been read or just printed out and
| ignored. A colleague in uni (way back in early 00s) would add
| these to her documents every once in a while to give them the
| "has been read" stamp of approval.
| cossatot wrote:
| And wine glass stains are the only way to know your paper has
| been graded.
| pwagland wrote:
| And tear stains, or the lack thereof, are the only sure sign
| of quality.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Reminds me of Windows 3.11 programs that would add random "coffee
| stains" to your "desktop" "wallpaper"
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2021) Some previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193
| pureagave wrote:
| This is wonderful to see. I was a student and then entered into
| the tech industry in the mid 90's and at that time the Internet
| had fun whimsical things like this almost weekly.
| mcswell wrote:
| Obviously this was whimsical when it came out. However...we
| were creating synthetic data for training and testing OCR in
| multiple scripts. We would take a web page in some language
| with a non-Roman script, and reproduce it as multiple PDFs
| using different fonts. We also added various kinds of blurring,
| using ImageMagick and---of course---this very coffee stains
| program!
| bmenrigh wrote:
| I'm happy this is public domain. In 2023 I used the stain images
| as the basis for a CTF challenge (for BSidesSF). The encoded flag
| given to participants was
| https://github.com/BSidesSF/ctf-2023-release/blob/main/alien...
|
| Unfortunately the challenge was a bit too hard and went unsolved
| during the competition.
| hughw wrote:
| It's hard to imagine a reason for it being kept... proprietary?
| bmenrigh wrote:
| A lot of people want to slap licenses on things without
| really thinking about what the license will do (or prevent),
| in practice.
|
| I like the author's note about the license: "As we do not
| believe in imaginary property, this package belongs to the
| public domain."
|
| I think it's much more common to see a Creative Commons
| license on this sort of thing.
| viraptor wrote:
| And even then, when people have good intentions they don't
| anyways know about edge cases. Please give things a licence
| in addition to placing it in public domain, because in some
| countries (like Australia) you can't release your rights
| that way.
| Drunk_Engineer wrote:
| Possibly related:
|
| https://badspot.us/Brown-Ring-of-Quality.html
| TwoFx wrote:
| Maybe I'm just missing the joke, but it feels worth pointing
| out that almost all of the logos on that page are clearly
| inspired by the enso circle from Zen art.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I think it would be cool to see a version for epub 3.3, which is
| mostly html/xhtml with some limitations
| tuhgdetzhh wrote:
| "This page was intentionally left blank" is also an all time
| favorite of mine.
| hanche wrote:
| There's an old story about that. Possibly apocryphal, but here
| goes:
|
| IBM mainframes used to come with documentation in ring binders.
| Some pages might indeed be marked "This page intentionally
| blank". And they would from time to time send out update
| packages to their customers, with instructions to replace pages
| so-and-so with the included replacements. On the replacement
| pages, text that had been altered would be marked with a change
| bar in the margin.
|
| Lo and behold, one day an update package was received,
| replacing one completely blank page with one bearing the text
| "This page intentionally blank". Complete with a change bar in
| the margin.
| kkkqkqkqkqlqlql wrote:
| Finally, I can drink my yerba mate and not be dismissed as a
| researcher.
| drob518 wrote:
| My life is complete. I can die happy.
| deckar01 wrote:
| Coffee stains should look like water color paints. The fluid
| deposits pigment more at dry boundaries as evaporation and
| absorption approach equilibrium.
| arunc wrote:
| To save our children in the academia, we need a "Rewrite In
| Typst" movement, the equivalent of rewrite in rust!
| sieste wrote:
| If only they had stuck with latex maths syntax instead of
| inventing their own, I would have switched ages ago and
| encouraged others to do the same...
| tcfhgj wrote:
| maybe someone will write a package for latex math
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| It's called mitex: https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex
| kzrdude wrote:
| math without infernal backslashes is one of the reasons I
| _love_ Typst
| xigoi wrote:
| What's the point of switching if you're going to leave in the
| worst part?
| auguzanellato wrote:
| There's a bit of resistance sadly. My supervisor is "forcing"
| me to use LaTeX for my MSc thesis sadly.
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(page generated 2026-01-07 23:00 UTC)