Ok … so let's write something about that yearbook I have mentioned the other day.

Basically the idea was to publish a yearbook for our faculty … the pre-graduate part of it at least (which means I am not in it). I, of course, agreed to help realizing the idea because it is something new and I got to do only the design and technical part (needles to mention I avoided everything else that I have been asked to do when the deadlines approached and some people ran away). Now, I am not sure how yearbooks are done on other universities and faculties but since the moment I have heard of an idea I had only one solution in my mind: Python + LaTeX … yup … the good old geek way of handling boring tasks like building a giant table out of a database. Unfortunately LaTeX turned out not to be ready for even as much of eye-candy my minimalistic design introduced to the document. I have heard that the new version might be more capable in that direction but I did not have the new version. Fortunately I found a pretty acceptable compromise solution: ConTeXt. It is also a TeX macro package but a bit more recent and designer friendly. After that everything went smoothly … NOT. Basically I have spent a month trying to put everything together the way I wanted it. In that time I could have put everything together by hand but there would be at least two cons in this approach:

• I would have to do it all over again next year
• I would need all the data one month before the deadline instead of 2 days before as it happened in this scenario.

I have actually wanted to write much more about the technical issues but then decided not to … many people are probably bored already ;) Now the yearbook is in print and I will report in a week or so how much of a disaster it was.