Tag: scale

Scale Text to the maximum of a page with LaTeX

Being confronted with having to produce a simple poster that holds just a few letter but prints them as big as possible, I found myself needing to scale text (or a letter) on a page.

At first, I found \scalebox, which unfortunately takes a scaling factor, and not two dimensions. Instead of trying to do math, I found \resizebox which does take dimensions (width and height).

You could think that simply scaling up to the \textwidth is enough, but it’s not as you can see from the following “l” which was typeset using this code:

\documentclass[
landscape,
a6paper,
]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\usepackage{palatino}
\begin{document}
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{l}%
\end{document}

And here’s the result:

"l" doesn't scale on A6 landscape paper

So the character doesn’t scale well in the sense that if it is too narrow, it would grow too tall. Unfortunately, it doesn’t automatically keep the aspect ratio and it doesn’t take such an argument as \includegraphic does. Fortunately, you can still make it keep the aspect ratio by globally setting the appropriate flag! So the following will work as expected:

\documentclass[landscape]{minimal}
\usepackage[showframe,a4paper]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\setkeys{Gin}{keepaspectratio}

\newcommand{\vstretch}[1]{\vspace*{\stretch{#1}}}
\usepackage{palatino}
\begin{document}
\resizebox{\textwidth}{\textheight}{l}%
\end{document}

Another last thing is then multiline and centered output. The awesome people over at texexchange have a solution:

\documentclass[landscape]{minimal}
\usepackage[showframe,a6paper]{geometry}
\usepackage{varwidth}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\setkeys{Gin}{keepaspectratio}

\newcommand{\vstretch}[1]{\vspace*{\stretch{#1}}}
\usepackage{palatino}
\begin{document}
\topskip0pt
% This seems to fully work
\vstretch{1}
\centering\noindent\resizebox*\textwidth\textheight{\begin{varwidth}{\textwidth}%
\centering%
foooooooooooooooo

\centering
bar%
\end{varwidth}}

\vstretch{1}

\pagebreak
% Trying to other method with the table
\vstretch{1}
\centering\noindent\resizebox*\textwidth\textheight{\begin{varwidth}{\textwidth}%
\begin{tabular}{@{}c@{}}
foooooooooooooooo\\

bar
\end{tabular}%
\end{varwidth}}
\vstretch{1}

\end{document}

And the rendered result:

Perfectly scale an image to the rest of a page with LaTeX

I had the following problem for a long time: I wanted to embed a picture into a page and automatically have it scaled to the maximum size that possibly fits the page, but not more. Obviously, simply doing a

\includeimage[width=\textwidth]{myimage}

wouldn’t do the job, because if the image is more tall than wide, the image would grow beyond the page. One could use the information from the \textheigth register, i.e. like

\includeimage[width=\textwidth,height=\textheight,keepaspectration=true]{myimage}

But that doesn’t take already existing text into account, i.e. some description above the image that you definitely want to have on the same page.

So Simon cooked up a macro that would allow me to do exactly what I wanted by creating a new box, getting its height and subtracting that from \textheight. Lovely. Here’s the code:

\newlength{\textundbildtextheight}
 
\newcommand{\textundbild}[2]{
\settototalheight\textundbildtextheight{\vbox{#1}}
#1
\vfill
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth,keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight-\the\textundbildtextheight]{#2}
\end{center}
\vfill
}

I’m sure it’s not very correct and it’s possible to make it not work properly, but it does the job very well for me as you can see on the following rendered pages:


DIN A4 Page
DIN A5 Page
DIN A6 Page

And well, the contents of the image is a bit ugly, too, but if you know a nice bullshit bingo generator, let me know.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.