Friday, June 3, 2011

Inverted pyramid typesetting

University thesis committees are fairly well-known in the typesetting world for having the most absurd requirements. One example requires heading text to be typeset centered and no more than 4.5 in wide in which the lines become progressively shorter.

This is stupid. Still, I've got a solution, based on egreg's:
\newcommand\stupid[1]{%
        \vbox{%
                \hsize=4.5in
                \parindent=0pt
                \leftskip=0pt plus.5fil
                \rightskip=0pt plus-0.5fil
                \parfillskip=0pt plus1fil
                \emergencystretch=1in
                \parshape6
                0.00in 4.50in
                0.25in 4.00in
                0.50in 3.50in
                0.75in 3.00in
                1.00in 2.50in
                1.25in 2.00in
                \huge
                \bfseries
                \strut
                #1%
        }%
}
The \parshape specifies what to do for the first 6 lines by giving pairs of numbers. The first in the pair is the indentation and the second is the line length. The settings of \leftskip, \rightskip, and \parfillskip come from TeX by Topic and are used to center the last line.

3 comments:

  1. Will definitely try this out. Yes the thesis correction office requires are absurd. Doesn't matter if your dissertation cures world hunger, they would like to see the inverted pyramid first before they can let u feed the world!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Will definitely try this out. Yes the thesis correction office requires are absurd. Doesn't matter if your dissertation cures world hunger, they would like to see the inverted pyramid first before they can let u feed the world!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Does not play well with margins, but appreciate the effort. May spend some time trying to get this to work because it fixed the hack I was using that broke chapter tiles in table of contents. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete