Creating the RLMeta poster
Published on 2020-05-24.
RLMeta is the most interesting program I've written. I find the grammar syntax beautiful to read and the meta-approach intriguing. To me, it approaches art. I wanted to showcase it by putting the whole implementation on a poster. Here is a preview:
Preview of poster.
Read on to learn how I created the poster and the RLMeta version displayed on it.
This article is about how I created the RLMeta poster. Do you want to get the poster yourself?
Poster design
I created the poster using Inkscape. I have used Inkscape on and off in the past, but I am by no means an expert. I used the inksyntax plugin to create syntax highlighted text.
To come up with the design for the poster, I started by creating text objects for each file in the implementation. Then I tried to fit them on a page. Portrait mode worked best since I did not want to break the VM implementation, which was the longest piece of text and determined the main layout of the poster. I also concluded that I needed three columns to fit all code and that I wanted them to be of equal width for symmetry. I modified the source code to better fit the poster layout. In particular I worked on reducing the number of lines of code. After a while, making the VM code shorter would not help to fit more on the page because I still needed three columns. I made lots of test printouts and edits. You can see some of them in the pictures below.
I experimented with landscape mode. I figured that it would be bad usage of available space. I also had an idea about drawing arrows to show how the source code flow in the compiler. I decided that it would just clutter the poster.
I printed half the poster on an A4 page to simulate text size on an A3 page. I concluded that the smallest text would probably be big enough if printed with a good printer.
Here I have gravitated toward the final base design. I still haven't given up on the arrows.
Here I have added introduction text and an example. My notes indicate improvements to RLMeta to make it a better fit for the poster. So even if this was printed on an A4 page on my cheap printer, it was possible to read, but not comfortable.
I did some test printouts on two A4 papers and taped them together to simulate final size. pdfposter was a useful tool here. Here is the command I used to split one A3 page in portrait mode into two A4 pages in landscape mode: pdfposter /tmp/rlmeta-a3.pdf /tmp/rlmeta-a4.pdf -m a4 -p 2x1a4.