LaTeX Coffee Stains (2021) [pdf]

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.

Feature request: even/odd page stains that line up exactly as a single thru-stain.

This is a good read for similar "fun" packages: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/67656/are-there-othe....

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.

Possibly related:

https://badspot.us/Brown-Ring-of-Quality.html

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.

Originally from 2009: https://web.archive.org/web/20201101013903/http://legacy.han...

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=hanno-rein.de and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193

This also reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30024165

Love this. My resume has been in LaTeX for over 20 years now.

Underappreciated IMHO. You can version control it, no dealing with wild Word shenanigans. Totally deterministic. Just find a style, insert your bullets and you have a nice sharable PDF.

Nowadays you can even have your preferred LLM do the conversion for you. LaTeX is finicky and I've had it fix warnings in mine that I couldn't be bothered to.

Good stuff, highly recommend a LaTeX resume, whether or not you drink coffee.

Not drinking coffee is the only reason I’ve ever felt truly excluded at a software company. Everyone loves their coffee!

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.

This looks like the old Lucent Technologies corporate logo. This would have been handy back in the day.

Half done job or just a starting point! We need also:

* tea strains

* bread crumbles (squashed among paper leaves)

* tomato sauce drops

* hair

> A lot of time can be saved by printing [extra stuff] directly on the page rather than adding them manually!

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.

Coffee stains should look like water color paints. The fluid deposits pigment more at dry boundaries as evaporation and absorption approach equilibrium.

Reminds me of Windows 3.11 programs that would add random "coffee stains" to your "desktop" "wallpaper"

Finally, I can drink my yerba mate and not be dismissed as a researcher.

Here we go, trying to feel authenticity in our new world. Mistakes are beautiful

To save our children in the academia, we need a "Rewrite In Typst" movement, the equivalent of rewrite in rust!

(2021) Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316193

as amazing as these are, they do still look a little fecal.

My life is complete. I can die happy.

I think it would be cool to see a version for epub 3.3, which is mostly html/xhtml with some limitations

"This page was intentionally left blank" is also an all time favorite of mine.

Brilliant! And people say Lucent overpaid for their logo.

Another essential package is realhats (replace boring \hat with real hats)!

https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats

Interesting way to apply a water mark

How nice.

Now I want a package to add blood stains on my murder mystery screenplay.