10. ⁑Business Cards, Flyers and Leaflets

There are only a few packages on CTAN for typesetting business cards listed under the file-card topic, and only one of them is for LaTeX2e (rather than the old LaTeX2.09) and that's bizcard [43]. At the time of writing, the current version is 1.1 dated 1999-09-04. It's in both MiKTeX and TeX Live, but is only suitable for the US 76.2 mm × 50.8 mm ( 2 in × 3.5 in) card size.

The labels topic provides some more options, but discounting Plain TeX and LaTeX2.09 options and also discounting packages that aren't in both MiKTeX and TeX Live, only three remain: jlabels [104] (for making letter-sized pages of labels), labels [68] (designed for sheets of Avery 5360 sticky labels, which could possibly be adapted for business cards) and ticket (for making labels, visiting-cards and pins). As far as I can tell, all these packages, with the exception of ticket, appear to be designed for letter paper.

The ticket package can be used with either letter or A4 paper (or any other size, if required). You just need to set up the paper margins, the size of each card, the distance between the cards and the number or rows and columns required to position the cards on the page. This package uses LaTeX's picture environment, which is an unsophisticated but platform-independent drawing environment.

The layout topic has a much greater list. Some of these are general purpose packages for positioning text or graphics on the page. The only one that seems to be specifically designed for leaflets is the leaflet class (version 1.0e 2013-11-06, at the time of writing) which can be used to create z-fold leaflets. The general purpose positioning packages include the flowfram package, which has an optional helper GUI application called flowframtk.

There don't appear to be any classes or packages listed on CTAN that specifically deal with single-paged flyers, but that's hardly surprising given the lack of structure in such a document. A flyer would typically need a graphics environment, such as the picture environment, to insert the required text and graphics, although a very simple text-only flyer could be created using the article class with an empty page style.

It's sometimes necessary to include bar codes, such as QR codes, in leaflets or flyers. There are a number of bar code packages listed in the barcode topic. For brevity, only pst-barcode is discussed.

The rest of this chapter is arranged as follows:

§10.1 The picture Environment: Describes how to use the picture environment (which is needed for the subsequent sections on using the ticket package and leaflet class).
§10.2 The ticket Package: Describes how to use the ticket package to create business cards.
§10.3 The leaflet Class: Describes how to use the leaflet class.
§10.4 The pst-barcode Package: Describes how to use the pst-barcode class.
§10.5 The flowfram Package and the flowframtk Application: Describes the flowfram package and the flowframtk application.

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