if it’s possible (and hence challenging myself) to fit my entire thesis onto a floppy disc. Yup, what will probably be a 300ish page, upto 120,000 word document, plus numerous images… onto a floppy disc. A 1.4mb disc. Seems a bit ludicrous I admit, and by no means am I going to break my back doing it, but I reckon it’s feasible. This beloved readers is part of the joy of LaTeX. No, no, not latex however much joy that may bring, LaTeX.
For example. this evening (yes a Friday evening) I stayed in the office till gone nearly 11pm working out some code. (Sad bastard, yes). You don’t need an image editor or anything fancy (or even basic like Paint) to create images. All you need is code, beautiful code. And it comes with advantages too.
Take this image here, this is what I was working on. It doesn’t look much, but it shows exactly what I need it to. Now, it could have been created in minutes in Paint or whatever, but, and this is the crucial bit, the size of the file would vary massively and you would be constrained by the dimensions you set-out initially. So if you make your image one size that’s it. If you want it bigger it’s going to pixelate and look shoddy. If you code it then it has no strict boundaries or limits, it will be regenerate freshly each time depending upon the size you specify, therefore meaning no degradation in quality. Always crisp and beautiful.
Now for size.
A LaTeX timeline
The image shown here is 66kb as a jpg (62kb incidentally when generated as a pdf). But this is post code generation; the actual code is much, much less. This image in code form is 1,519 bytes, or 1.48kb. Or in more nutty terms, almost 42 images for the same size as one pdf image. Now being realistic I’m probably not going to need many more images than 42, but if I needed to I could, and still more than happily fit them and all the text onto the floppy disc.
So there you have it. Perfect sense.
Now if anyone is actually debating this, I promise with a bit of practice it’s not that bad. OK I lie, it’s infuriating and I’m capable of managing basic stuff but learning more everyday. So here’s the code required for this image. Have a pleasant evening, I have!
\begin{figure}[ht]
\resizebox{15cm}{!}{
\begin{tikzpicture}
%Draw rectangles and overlay using xshift and yshift
\draw[black, thick, fill=white] (-3,-2) rectangle (3,2);
\draw[black, thick, fill=white, xshift=4cm, yshift=-3cm] (-3,-2) rectangle (3,2);
\draw [black, thick, fill=white, xshift=8cm, yshift=-6cm] (-3,-2) rectangle (3,2);
\draw [black, thick, fill=white, xshift=12cm, yshift=-9cm] (-3,-2) rectangle (3,2);
% Text within rectangles aligned with above figures
\node [scale=2] {[Task Cue]};
\node [xshift=8cm, yshift=-6cm, scale=2] {[Target]};
% Text below rectangles
\node [xshift=-2.25cm, yshift=-2.25cm] {1000ms};
\node [xshift=1.75cm, yshift=-5.25cm] {1000ms};
\node [xshift=6.5cm, yshift=-8.25cm] {Until Response};
\node [xshift=9.75cm, yshift=-11.25cm] {150ms};
% Enclosing curly brace and text above
\draw [black, decorate, decoration={brace, amplitude=5pt}] (-3,-9) — (2.75,-9)
node [black, midway, above=4pt] {\LARGE Target Stimuli};
% Mini stimuli images
\draw (-2.5,-10) node[draw,circle,minimum size=1cm,fill=red!100,draw=black,thick]{};
\draw (-1,-10) node[draw,minimum size=1cm,fill=blue!100,draw=black,thick]{};
\draw (0.5,-10) node[draw,circle,minimum size=1cm,fill=blue!100,draw=black,thick]{};
\draw (2,-10) node[draw,minimum size=1cm,fill=red!100,draw=black,thick]{};
% adjustments for line width choose: line width=2pt or very thick etc
\draw[->>, line width=2pt, blue, dashed] (4,2)–(15,-6);
\node [xshift=12cm, yshift=-9cm, scale=6, red] {\smiley};
\end{tikzpicture} }
\end{figure}
