Fourth installment: How to write a business letter using TeX/LaTeX

I continue my experiments with TeX/LaTeX. There's just something I like about working with mark-up. I suppose that for most people, the mark-up would hopelessly complicate things. But I find the opposite to be the case for me.

That dates back probably at least as far as the first word processor I used with regularity--WordPerfect (WP hereafter) 4.0. It was also a console application, one that I managed to learn my way around fairly easily. It ran on a 286 with a whopping 20 megabytes of hard drive space and probably not more than 2 megabytes of RAM.

One of the great things about that version of WP was a feature it had called "reveal codes." If some aspect of the document you were working on looked weird and you couldn't correct by selecting various canned options, you could use the "reveal codes" feature to examine the situation behind the scenes. Despite the fact that my computer knowledge was extremely paltry back then, I don't think I ever confronted a situation where, by revealing those codes, I wasn't able to straighten things out.

Skip forward about a year to when I had finally gotten rid of the old computer and was using a "modern" word processor--Word 6.0. Imagine my surprise and dismay when, having issues with documents I was creating with that version of Word, I discovered that the program had no "reveal codes" feature. I was stuck with whatever Word wanted to give me, and that was that (a more technical explanation of the matters at issue can be read here).

So, my interest in TeX/LaTeX perhaps traces, ultimately, to the frustrations I encountered long ago with using more "modern" word processing applications. Whatever the motivations, I continue to experiment--and am now even having modest successes--with TeX/LaTeX.

Recently, I had another opportunity to continue my experimentation with  TeX/LaTeX. I needed to write an official, business-type letter and decided to try writing it with TeX/LaTeX.

I must admit there were also other motivating factors--not least of which was that, since I write so few of these types of letters, I can never remember the proper format and need, each time I write one, to do some web research aimed at refreshing my memory about that prior to composing the letter. TeX/LaTeX could be of assistance here since, I assumed, the letter document class should already be set to output the proper format--which did, indeed, turn out to be the case.

The down side was that it took me an inordinately long time to compose this fairly short letter: but that was, in part, because I wasted a lot of time in a largely fruitless attempt to utilize what was supposed to be a new-and-improved letter class, something called scrlttr2, a component of what is called the "KOMA bundle." Had I just used the old letter document class and not spent so much time trying to get scrlttr2 to do what I wanted, it probably would have taken me about half as long. A long time to write just one letter but, given that it was my first try using this application and that I had some spare time to spend on it, not too bad.

I was successful in the end. Below I'll paste a template for the letter I wrote, one that contains a nice tweak that causes a scanned signature to be printed.

Without further ado, here's the template I used (some explanation below):

\documentclass[12pt]{letter}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{graphicx} %so that signature graphic can be included
%\signature{Name Surname}
\address{My Street \\ My City zip \\ Phone: 555-555-5555 \\ e-mail: me@mydomain.whrvr}
\begin{document}
\begin{letter}{Recipient \\ Recipient's street \\ Recipient's city zip\\ country}
\opening{To whom it may concern:}
This letter is written for the purpose of \ldots

If you have any questions, or would like to see some additional documentation, please do not hesitate to contact me.
\closing{Sincerely,\\
\fromsig{\includegraphics[width=55mm]{Mysig.jpeg}}\\
\fromname{My Name}
}
% \ps{P.S. Here goes your ps.}
% \encl{Enclosures.}
\end{letter}
\end{document}

The first thing I'd like to explain is the use of the graphicx package, which is what allows for the graphic of the signature file to be included. Simply scan your signature and save it as a jpg file (other image formats may work, though jpg is the only one I tested). It will need to be saved within the directory from which you're compiling your letter. Stipulate the size you want for the signature, and pdflatex will include it once you compile.

The other fields in the template should be self-explanatory. I've commented out some of them (the percentage sign is the comment character in TeX/LaTeX), either because they did not apply to the letter I was writing--for example, the PS and enclosure options at the end--or perhaps because it was something that I tried but that didn't have the desired result (the "signature" option in the preamble).

The template should work as is. Just save it as a .tex file, enter your values in place of the generic information, scan your signature and save it to the same directory, then run pdflatex on the .tex file. You should end up with a nicely-formatted business letter.

EDIT: Thanks to those commenters who pointed out the the missing \end{document} tag at the letter's end--not sure how I left that out but it's now been added.