Andrew Lisy's Blog

Those of you that have undergone a wedding (and more of you that are currently planning a wedding yourself) know that just about every aspect -- from the food, to the flowers to the transportation -- is heavily marked up. Printed materials, like the program, are no exception -- printers charge an arm and a leg to churn out a good looking program. But what alternatives do you have? I've seen many, many ugly and stereotypical programs created with Microsoft Word that lacked the polish and pizazz that the professionally-done ones have. There is just something about the ordinary, boring fonts and predictable spacing that makes Word programs, well, less than special.

There is a solution, although it requires a few notches on the geek scale. LaTeX is a free, professional-level software package to typeset just about anything. Academics use it to make their papers look great, publishers use it for crisp looking books -- and now you can use it for your wedding! Here are some screenshots -- check out the beautiful calligraphy font (called calligra (get it here)) and other niceties. This one is for a Catholic wedding, but you could definitely modify it to fit any style wedding. Here are the files: Download: wedding_program.zip

1. I used a shot glass to trace the circles. It was a perfect size.
2. It's important to get as perfect of a triangle as possible, so that your ornament fits together correctly. The best way to make a perfect triangle is to cut out a circle, fold it in half, then in half again (so that you have a quarter circle). Unfold, and mark a strip of paper the length of the radius of the circle (see picture). Then use this to make 6 marks around the perimeter of the circle. Connect 3 of them and you've made a perfect triangle. Cut out this template triangle to use when tracing onto the other circles.
3. Make sure that pictures and circles you glue in are facing right-side-up
4. Glue a piece of ribbon through the hole in the top piece before you glue everything together