mclearc / letter-boilerplate

Quickly and painlessly generate high-quality letters from markdown through LaTeX

Letter Boilerplate

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?

Dependencies

1. LaTeX with the following extra packages: fontspec geometry ragged2e enumitem xunicode xltxtra hyperref polyglossia
2. 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.

Getting started

1. Edit details.yml with your details, your recipient's details, and the desired settings.
2. Open content.md and write your letter in markdown.
3. 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.

Available settings

• 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 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.

Recommended readings

• 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

See also

• cv-boilerplate — Easing the process of building and maintaining a CV using LaTeX

License

MIT