left generates pdf formatted letters from plain text files. Hence the name left as in "LEtter From Txt".
left is licensed under the GPL, version 3.
left uses go-fpdf to render PDF files, which is licensed under the MIT license
To get information on how to use left, run
left -help
left reads configuration files in the following order, where settings in later files override settings read from earlier files:
- /etc/left/defaults.json (when running on linux)
- ${UserConfigDir}/left/defaults.json (also see UserConfigDir documentation)
- optionally the config file specified via command line argument
- the configuration in the letter input file
left can dump a sample configuration to stdout that can be used as a starting point:
left -dump-config
As stated above, left creates letters from simple text input files. To get started, run the following command and left will output a working letter input file to stdout:
left -create
To build the project from source you first need to install go.
Then cd into the project root folder and type:
go build left
I edit my letters with vim. While left does not care about the file extension, I find it useful to give my letters the extension .left. Then I add the following section to my vim config and get reasonable syntax highlighting:
augroup left_ft
au!
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.left set syntax=javascript
augroup END