Fridge mathematics

[pozorvlak]

OK, I've looked at some "official" fridge poetry, and it's printed in 20pt Times New Roman on segments that are a fraction less than 1cm high. The baseline is not a fixed distance from the bottom: rather, the word is centred in the tile

Comments

[michiexile]

I recall doing a script to produce scrabble pieces in IPA using LaTeX and some creative scripting. Turned out rather neat - and could possibly work for this as well. What you'll want to do is to contain each word or wordlet in a parbox with visible borders or corners; and let the layout engine do its magic within the parbox, but stay off of layouting outside it. I think it may well be workable.

The central script engine was ipagen.pl, which took whitespace delimited input on the format
n blah p
and produced n squares with blahp in each square. Please steal any and all code you may be able to use from there.

[pozorvlak]

Brilliant, thanks! I was thinking of doing something like that with boxes, and I wasn't sure whether to write Perl or try to implement map in TeX :-)

PDF or PS

[anonymous]

Go for PDF, convenient for the printer too.

Afternoon

Re: PDF or PS

[pozorvlak]

I was definitely going to distribute it as a PDF (TeX-to-PDF conversion is fairly good), but do you mean writing PS by hand like elvum suggests? I suppose it could actually be the easiest way...

[terpsichore1980]

Some kind of wipe clean paper covering is always useful for anything in the kitchen, not that I count as an arty type ;-).

[elvum]

I suggest learning Postscript.

I also suggest sticky-back plastic. (And possibly yoghurt pots.)

[dynix]

you could make the words using a dymo printer and then affix magnets to the back. It wouldnt look like magnetic poetry at all but it would be very cool:)

I second the sticky back plastic idea though. You can also get shellac-style clear varnish from places that specialise in model building kit.

[pozorvlak]

Words-with-magnets is not the problem - as previously mentioned, you can get paper with magnets already attached, which can go through inkjet printers. But yeah, sticky-back plastic could solve the wipe-clean problem (but wouldn't it eventually dry out and flake off?)

[dynix]

Dymo does unfortunately have a habit of peeling off over time. Not usually helped by the fact that it comes on rolls and so "likes" to curl back to that conformation. Plus the ridges might cause accumulation of crud in all but the cleanest kitchen.

I'd think that some sort of varnish or glaze would be the answer. Find a nice art/craft shop and ask the assistants. They are often a treasure trove of useful information, and hardly ever get to use it.

[pozorvlak]

Yeah - it was via a conversation with an art shop assistant that I learned of the existence of magnetic inkjet paper :-)