[texhax] LaTeX - sample letters

William Adams will.adams at frycomm.com
Tue Aug 1 13:41:55 CEST 2006


On Jul 31, 2006, at 8:04 PM, cga2000 wrote:

> What I was hoping to find was a sort of "letter
> showcase" where you could view a collection of different style letters
> and choose the one(s) that you might find suitable .. download  
> the .tex
> files and use them as templates.

I don't think such exists, unless it's a part of the newlfm package.

I'm sure that if you put such a thing together it'd be appreciated as  
an article in TUGboat or The Practical TeX Journal.

> I'm unsure what a "package" actually means in LaTeX parlance.  For
> instance I recently found one that's already installed on this debian
> system and the way this works is really quite different from  
> anything I
> have seen before:
>
> You just add a:
>
> \usepackage{nopageno}
>
> in your preamble
>
> .. and page numbering magically disappear from your entire document..!
>
> I try to think of a LaTeX package as a style file but obviously  
> there is
> more to it than that.

It's a strange distinction. The new parlance of documentclass I think  
helps a bit.

A package is a (hopefully) general purpose collection of macros which  
can be used to extend documentclasses.

> Another source of confusion where I am concerned is that I am never
> sure whether a given LaTeX package is already installed and if not,
> what *debian* package it might be a part of.
>
> What I did to try and find letter samples that might already installed
> on my laptop was a:
>
> $ locate letter | grep tex
>
> .. pretty lame but that was the only thing I could think of.
>
> There is a texdoc command that's already installed on this box but
> using it effectively is only possible if you already know the
> name of a particular package.

That's always been a problem. Graham Williams' catalogue helps a bit  
on this, as does the FAQ.

> I probably need to find some debian doc relative to TeX/LaTeX since
> many of my current problems seem to be more related to packaging  
> issues
> than LaTeX proper. I am concerned I might download packages from CTAN
> that may be incompatible with my base LaTeX install and end up  
> damaging
> my system.
>
> Maybe I need to do a non-debian install of TeX/LaTeX in /usr/local or
> my home directory and just use that instead that the one that came  
> with
> my distro.

I'd suggest joining TUG or your local user's group and installing  
TeXLive.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications



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