A boilerplate to quickly and painlessly generate high-quality letters through LaTeX. The perfect companion to cv-boilerplate.
Why settle for MS Word when you can get the job done using your text editor?
- LaTeX with the following extra packages:
fontspec
geometry
ragged2e
enumitem
xunicode
xltxtra
hyperref
polyglossia
- Pandoc
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.
- Edit
details.yml
with your details, your recipient's details, and the desired settings. - Open
content.md
and write your letter in markdown. - Run
make
to compile the PDF.
The template automatically includes signature.pdf
after the letter's body as a final touch. Follow this method to import your own signature.
Refer to pandoc's documentation to learn more about how templates work.
Note: this template needs to be compiled with XeTeX.
mainfont
: Hoefler Text is the default, but every font installed on your system should work out of the box (thanks, XeTeX!)sansfont
: 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 thepolyglossia
package. This is important for proper hyphenation and date format.geometry
: A string that sets the margins throughgeometry
. Read this to learn how this package works.
- The Beauty of LaTeX by Dario Taraborelli
- Letterhead advices from Butterick's Practical Typography
- Why Microsoft Word must Die by Charlie Stross
- Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown by Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff
- cv-boilerplate — Easing the process of building and maintaining a CV using LaTeX