LaTeX offers a variety of built-in document classes. One of them is letter
, which is designed for writing official letters, such as the one I just did to the (inept) agency that manages my flat. However, that standard document class is not very well liked: it's the ugly little duckling of the LaTeX document classes. But when you just have to get things done, better the devil you know than the one you don't. So here's a quick summary of easy tweaks I applied to my letter to bend the default document class to my needs.
Structure
The letter document class requires a specific structure. It is designed so that you can write several letters to several recipients while using the same return address. The basic structure of a letter document looks something like this:
\documentclass{letter} \address{The return address} \signature{Your signature} \begin{document} \begin{letter}{The recipient's address} \opening{The opening, such as: Dear Sir,} The body of the letter \closing{The closing, such as: Best regards,} \end{letter} \end{document}
The letter
environment that is enclosed in the document
environment looks superfluous at first. The idea is that you can have several letter
environments when you want to produce more than a single letter: this can be very useful for mailings.
Top space
The document class introduces a lot of white space at the top. This is good for a multi-page letter but looks really awkward on a single page letter. So, I did what the TeX FAQ suggests and added the following in the preamble, just after the \documentclass
command:
\makeatletter \let\@texttop\relax \makeatother \begin{document}
Adding a reference
As my managing agent specified a reference in the letter they sent me, I wanted to include that reference in my letter, just after their address but with some small vertical space in between. There is no obvious way to do that so I just added it to the end of the recipient's address with a space of length \parskip
:
\begin{letter}{The recipient's address\\[\parskip] Your ref: The reference}
Adding some vertical space before the closing sentence
The closing sentence is printed very close to the last paragraph in the letter. I wanted a bit more space so added the following just before the \closing
command:
\vspace{3\parskip} \closing{The closing, such as: Best regards,}
Adding space between the closing and the signature
When writing a letter, I like leaving enough space between the closing sentence and the printed signature so that I can add a hand written signature once it's printed. The standard space is too small for this. However, considering both lines are printed by the \closing
command, there is no obvious way to include any space in between. However, looking at the letter.cls
code, it appears that the standard template adds 6 times the \medskipamount
length in between the two lines so the simple way to change that space is to change the relevant length just before the \closing
command:
\vspace{3\parskip} \addtolength{\medskipamount}{2\medskipamount} \closing{The closing, such as: Best regards,}
This will multiply the \medskipamount
length by 3 and as result multiply the space between closing and signature by 3 as well. This works great for a single letter but will not have the intended result when you have multiple letters in the same document. The way to avoid this is to save the original length and restore it afterwards:
\vspace{3\parskip} \setlength{\oldmedskipamount}{\medskipamount} \addtolength{\medskipamount}{2\medskipamount} \closing{The closing, such as: Best regards,} \setlength{\medskipamount}{\oldmedskipamount}
With those few tricks, I got a letter that was close enough to what I wanted. I could probably have spent a lot more time tweaking it or trying alternative document classes but this particular job didn't warrant me spending too much time on it.
6 comments:
Thanks buddy. Good info :)
Thanks so much for this. I added a signature image, so I needed to reduce the amount of space between the Closing and the printed name because the image just adds even more space, rather than using up space.
Simpler way to deal with the closing/sig spacing issue: put everything in the \closing, e.g. \closing{Sincerely,\\ \includegraphics{mysig.pdf}}
Awesome! Thank you.
Thanks so much for these tips! The seemingly unchangeable whitespace in the \closing was driving me crazy :).
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