January 7, 2026
Brew-tiful watermark wars
LaTeX Coffee Stains [pdf]
LaTeX lets you print coffee rings; commenters spill
TLDR: A playful add-on lets LaTeX documents print realistic coffee rings with adjustable style and placement. Commenters turned it into a mini culture war—calling it clever watermarking, mocking the Lucent logo look, and reigniting Typst vs LaTeX (and HTML vs Markdown) debates—showing how even a coffee ring stirs big tool loyalty.
Academic papers just got messy—in a good way. A new LaTeX add-on lets you print coffee rings right onto your pages, picking from four artsy splashes and dialing in transparency, size, tilt, and position. It’s free, cheekily anti–intellectual property, and asks for donations in coffee. But the real brew is the comments: one camp cheers the watermark hack, another is convinced it’s the Lucent logo resurrected, and a third sips nostalgia while muttering “How nice.” The repo’s here: framagit.
Then the tool wars spilled. A Typst fan swaggered in to say it’s “pleasant” over there and we’d have switched if academia didn’t cling to LaTeX; someone else flexed with HTML stains and dunked on Markdown’s clean-cut vibe. Cue drama over whether this is delightful whimsy or a productivity crime scene. Jokes flew: “peer review, now with caffeine,” “Lucent overpaid for this ring,” and calls to expand the splatter catalog—tea, latte, even gazpacho—plus grease stains for repair manuals. The strongest opinions split between “clever watermarking” and “silly gimmick,” with meme energy powering the whole thread. Verdict from the crowd: stain your slides, stain your thesis, stain your soul—just don’t let the committee ask why your methods section is wearing a donut.
Key Points
- •The coffeestains LaTeX package prints coffee stain graphics in documents, offering four preset types (A–D).
- •Users control transparency, scale, rotation (degrees), and x/y offsets relative to the page center for stain placement.
- •Installation involves adding coffeestains.sty and including \usepackage{coffeestains}; example commands are provided.
- •The package is freely distributable; stains were created by Hanno Rein using GIMP and traced with Inkscape; donations are in coffee to his UTSC address.
- •A change log from 2009–2021 details contributions by Rein, Sultanik, Randez, Robson, and maintainer Bideault, including a rotation behavior change in 2021 and git repository hosting.