Chuck

Okay #LaTex nerds time to show off 😃

I'm formatting a page for an e-paper display. I want to set my page dimensions to the size of the display's pixels. I want zero page margin (as that is provided by the case it is in). Post TeX, I'm going push PDF through convert(1) to generate a 8 bit greyscale PNG image.

What is the currently approved way to set that up? Just a new paper size? Or whole new document class? Or what?

Err #latex_tex

Oct 2, 2024 at 12:04amWeb
Show threadChuckOct 2, 2024

Alas the nerds are all asleep.

After some spelunking \usepackage{geometry} followed by \geometry{paperwidth=5.5in, ...}

That generated a pdf which I can convert to a PNG for the display. Unfortunately the quality is not great, sample at 1:1

Any thoughts on that? Better fonts perhaps?

Show threadDougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄)Oct 2, 2024

@ChuckMcManis
Writing from theory, not practice:

You should do all conversions at a higher sampling rate than the output you care about (e.g. 2X), and do it in grey scale even if you want B/W in your final (for one thing this allows experimenting with setting various thresholds in going from grey to b/w)

Show threadCaleb MaclennanOct 2, 2024
@ChuckMcManis My experience with this suggests you will actually want some margins. The bezel is usually at least a mm or two above the display surface—even a flush case will be proud of the actual pixels because they are behind protective layers. Additionally the bezel will not be a perfect color match for the e-ink background, and can be totally different if a backlight is involved. Pad your text content at least 0.5en so the reading eye isn't distracted by the proximity of substrate changes.
Show threadChuckOct 2, 2024
@alerque I've come to a similar conclusion. And adding nofoot=true to my geometry values got rid of the unneeded footer. However now when I set margins, dvipng puts out a smaller image and doesn't "pad" with whitespace. I can work around that by offsetting the image draw, but it was surprising.