Finest letter typesetting from the command line
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?
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)I highly recommend TinyTeX as LaTeX distribution. All additional packages can be installed with tlmgr
as needed.
letter.md
and fill the YAML frontmatter with your details, your recipient's details, optional subject line, and the desired settings.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.
Although I didn't test it, you can probably use this on Windows, too. Both Pandoc and LaTeX can be installed on Windows 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
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 to 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
)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.