Showcase of beautiful invitations in TeX

Question

I'm interested in using TeX and friends to produce beautifully typeset invitations (for parties, weddings, and especially thesis defences). I understand that there is a package gcard for making folded greeting cards, but it's fairly simple. I would love to see a list of, or links to, more sophisticated-looking examples for inspiration and motivation. (If the complete source code is freely available and adaptable, so much the better.)

You might have a look at this: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/219774/showcase-of-programming-your-document-paradigm/219776#219776 — cryingshadow, Dec 03 '15 at 19:23
Here is a discussion of using mailmerge to assist in content creation for invitations. http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/60894/how-do-i-insert-names-into-birthday-invitations-automatically — R. Schumacher, Dec 03 '15 at 20:16
And here is another one: N ary switchs (selectors / conditionnals / toggles) to handle mailling list. — Clément, Dec 03 '15 at 20:47

Henri Menke · Answer 1 · 2015-12-09T08:11:34.450

40

I made an invitation using Xe/LuaLaTeX and a TikZ fading over an OpenStreetMap generated map excerpt. Here is a link to the map I used (I don't know how long it is valid).

\documentclass{article}
\pagestyle{empty}
\usepackage{geometry,fontspec,tikz}
\geometry{a6paper,landscape,hmargin={1cm,1cm},vmargin={1cm,1cm}}
\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{Adobe Garamond Pro}
\usetikzlibrary{fadings}
\tikzfading[name=fade right,
left color=transparent!0,
right color=transparent!100]
\setlength\parindent{0pt}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[overlay,remember picture]
  \node[anchor=east,inner sep=0pt] (pic) at (current page.east)
    {\includegraphics[height=\pdfpageheight]{map}};
  \fill[white,path fading=fade right] (pic.north west) rectangle (pic.south east);
  \coordinate (pin) at (12,-2.5);
  \filldraw[ultra thick,draw=red,fill=red!50] (pin) -- ++(70:.5) arc (-20:200:.18) -- cycle;
  \path (pin) -- ++(0,.5) node[draw,fill,red,circle,inner sep=1pt] {};
\end{tikzpicture}%
\obeylines%
{\addfontfeatures{Scale=3,LetterSpace=10} INVITATION}

\bigbreak
\textit{%
  Dear friend,

  I'd love to invite you to my party.

  Sincerly, your friend.
}

\vfill

{\addfontfeatures{Scale=1.4,LetterSpace=5}\scshape when?}
\textit{%
  December 24\/\rlap{,}\textsuperscript{th} 2015
  8\kern.5pt:\kern.5pt30 pm
}
\medbreak
{\addfontfeatures{Scale=1.4,LetterSpace=5}\scshape where?}
\textit{%
  Times Square,
  London E1,
  UK
}
\end{document}

edited Dec 09 '15 at 08:11

answered Dec 05 '15 at 23:31

Henri Menke

109,596

1

Very nice, simple, and lovely. How would you do it in a Lua version ? – Julien Dec 08 '15 at 23:47
1

@Julien I edited the file to also work with LuaLaTeX, i.e. I replaced \XeTeXpdffile with \includegraphics. Also I set inner sep=0pt for the picture to get rid of the ugly white stripe on the right. – Henri Menke Dec 09 '15 at 08:13
In my latex its telling that, fontsec package needs xelatex.. but how can I use this in my latex ??@HenriMenke – David Dec 09 '15 at 11:31
@David As noted in this showcase, you have to typeset this using either xelatex or lualatex. Furthermore you need to have the “Adobe Garamond Pro” font installed. – Henri Menke Dec 09 '15 at 11:57
I've just ran a test, awesome, this work perfectly. To be noted, I had to remove the font line specification (\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{Adobe Garamond Pro}), since I don't have it on my laptop, still, it's looking very nice. Thanks. – Julien Dec 09 '15 at 14:08

Psychonaut · Answer 2 · 2016-02-15T14:16:34.583

25

Thanks to everyone who's posted a sample invitation here. For my own purposes, I decided in the end to go with something a bit different. I'm posting it here in case anyone else would like to adapt it for themselves.

The invitation is printed on textured, A4-size card stock, folded in half to make A5 pages. The inner page of the invitation uses a decorative border from the frontispiece of Quadrans Astrolabicus, a 1534 book written by Oronce Finé and printed in Paris by Simon de Colines. The text is set in EB Garamond with occasional use of fancy ligatures and coloured initials. Here's what it looks like:

I also used the labels package to produce personalized RSVP cards.

Here is a PDF demonstrating the inner page, outer page, and RSVP cards.

The complete and freely licensed XeLaTeX source code is available on GitHub.

edited Feb 15 '16 at 14:16

answered Feb 15 '16 at 13:10

Psychonaut

3,142

Fantastic! Only for this you deserve the Ph. D. :-) – TeXtnik Feb 15 '16 at 14:08
This is beautiful and sadly too nice to just pick up and reuse... Great work nevertheless. – XXX Mar 20 '17 at 19:34
2

A bit off-topic, but your thesis is actually very interesting!! I'm a huge fan of puns btw :) – DLJ Dec 23 '17 at 07:21