Letter Boilerplate

A boilerplate to quickly and painlessly generate high-quality letters through LaTeX.

Why settle for MS Word when you can get the job done using your text editor?

Dependencies

1. LaTeX with the following extra packages: fontspec geometry ragged2e enumitem xunicode xltxtra hyperref polyglossia footmisc (also, datetime2 plus its language modules if you want to use a custom date, see below in the settings section)
2. Pandoc, the universal document converter.

To install LaTeX on Mac OS X, I recommend getting the smaller version BasicTeX from here and installing the additional packages with tlmgr afterwards. Same goes for Linux: install texlive-base with your package manager and add the needed additional packages later.

To install pandoc on Mac OS X, run brew install pandoc. To install it on Linux, refer to the official docs.

Getting started

1. Open letter.md and fill the YAML frontmatter with your details, your recipient's details, optional subject line, and the desired settings.
2. Write your letter in markdown below.
3. Run make to compile the PDF.

If a file named signature.pdf is present in the directory, the boilerplate will automatically print it after the letter's body as a final touch. Follow this method to import your own signature.

Note: this template needs to be compiled with XeTeX.

Note for Windows users

Although I didn't test it, you can probably use this on Windows, too. Both Pandoc and LaTeX can be installed on Windows (I recommend MiKTeX for that) and you should be able to run makefiles on Windows through Cygwin. If that's too much hassle, this command should do the trick in Powershell:

pandoc letter.md -o output.pdf --template=template.tex --pdf-engine=xelatex

Available settings

• subject: The letter's subject (optional)
• mainfont: Hoefler Text is the default, but every font installed on your system should work out of the box (thanks, XeTeX!)
• altfont: Used to render the recipient address so that it stands out from the rest of the letter.
• fontsize: Possible values here are 10pt, 11pt and 12pt.
• lang: Sets the main language through the polyglossia package. This is important for proper hyphenation and date format.
• geometry: A string that sets the margins through geometry. Read this to learn how this package works.
• letterhead: include custom letterhead in the PDF (see below).
• customdate: Allows you to specify a custom date in the format YYYY-MM-DD in case you need to pre/postdate your letter. Caveat: Requires datetime2 along with its language module (ex: if lang is set to german do tlmgr install datetime2 datetime2-german)

Custom letterhead

If you have already designed your own letterhead and want to use it with this template, including it should be easy enough. Set the letterhead option to true to activate the wallpaper package in the template. wallpaper will look for a file named letterhead.pdf in the project root folder and print it on the PDF before compiling the document. Change the fonts to match the ones in your letterhead, adjust the margins with geometry and you should be all set.

Recommended readings

• Typesetting Automation, my article about this project with in-depth instructions and some suggestions for an ideal workflow.
• The Beauty of LaTeX by Dario Taraborelli
• Letterhead advices from Butterick's Practical Typography
• Multichannel Text Processing by iA
• Why Microsoft Word must Die by Charlie Stross
• Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient by Allin Cottrell
• Proprietary Binary Data Formats: Just Say No! by Sam Steingold
• Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown by Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff

Resources

• Refer to pandoc's documentation to learn more about how templates work.
• If you're not familiar with the YAML syntax, here's a good overview.
• If you want to edit the template but LaTeX scares you, these docs put together by ShareLaTeX cover most of the basics and are surprisingly kind to the beginner.
• Odds are your question already has an answer on TeX Stack Exchange. Also, pretty friendly crowd in there.
• Need to fax that letter? Check out Phaxio and learn how to send your faxes from the command line with a simple API call.

See also

• invoice-boilerplate — Simple automated LaTeX invoicing system
• cv-boilerplate — Easing the process of building and maintaining a CV using LaTeX

License

MIT