[FOSDEM] Fosdem schedule as pdf

[Philip Paeps]

On 26 Jan 2012, at 16:18, Pascal Bleser wrote:
> On 2012-01-26 10:08:48 (+0100), Marc Coevoet <sintsixtus at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I remember I printed some A3 pages with the schedule on it last
>> year.  I suppose a version of this schedule will be available soon?
> 
> Possibly. I do that every year but it's a completely manual
> process to craft that, and I'm not sure I'll have the time to do
> that this year (takes several hours, and this time it requires
> cramming 420 sessions into that instead of 320 as with previous
> years).

Maybe it's time to automate that too?  Instead of producing HTML for
the website, you can probably convince the script to produce LaTeX.
I would volunteer to do it, but I really have no time.

> If anyone else would like to do that and contribute it, that
> would be more than welcome ;)

Yeah.  It should be really easy.  Just spit out a reasonable LaTeX
preamble and then a longtable for every room or something.

> I'm sure quite a few people will read this and think "huh,
> manually? hah, I can do better and I'll just make a script that
> generates LaTeX", etc... -- believe me, it requires a lot of hand
> crafting in order to fit 400 sessions in 25 rooms in parallel on
> an acceptable page format ;)

Well, maybe not that easy but... :)  Definitely not impossible.  It
helps that you're on A3 and not on A5.  LaTeX is really good when
you have a lot of space to let it play with.  It's really fiddly on
small paper sizes.

I'd start by turning the rooms into tabulars or longtables and then
using something like textcomp to shuffle them around the page.

 - Philip [has a very used copy of the TeXBook]

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information