productbox: Yet another type of box
Humans are tied to the physical world. Even in the age of software it is desirable to have a physical representation for it. In the commercial world the software is sold in product boxes containing a CD or DVD and printed documentation. But even for open source software having a product box provides a means to associate a physical object with the more or less virtual entity “software”.
There are many programs around devoted to producing layouts for product boxes. Each graphics program can be used for this purpose as well. Nevertheless the integration of material from the TeX world is not that easy.
The LaTeX package productbox is an attempt to use the possibilities for LaTeX and some packages to provide a means for typesetting the faces of a product box and assemble them into a three-dimensional image.
Note that this “image” is in fact a pdf object. It can be scaled without loss of quality. It is also possible to extract the text from the product box by cut and paste in an appropriate pdf reader.
Download
Here you can download the sources and documentation.
Code for the style and the documentation
productbox.tgz, 393 kb
Documentation in PDF format productbox.pdf, 384 kb
Project Repository
The sources of productbox are stored in a public repository. It is hosted by Sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/p/gene-tex-lib/svn/HEAD/tree/productbox/