Minimalia

Time flies and almost one year went by without me writing the 5th part of Your Curriculum in LaTeX series. You know what? I grew tired of the tutorial: you can figure out the rest¹

Instead, I decided to start a new tutorial, this time illustrating a way to obtain a stylish cover letter with XeTeX (and XeLaTeX), which enables the easy use of OpenType fonts (through the fontspec package) and support for Unicode text (no need of escape extended characters anymore). Also, as in the other tutorial, KOMA-Script will be used.

The cover letter is the first thing they will read; possibly its form is as much important as its content. Even if you don't agree, a fancy letter doesn't do any harm, doesn't it? For example, what about a letter like this²

Strong header, contact data in footer, logo as watermark. Even a barcode to pimp the destination address! Ok, the barcode is a little bit too nerdy, but it will give me the chance to show how easy is to use PSTricks from inside XeLaTex.

In this tutorial I will also show how to separate the content of your letters from the style, so you can swap the latter really easily, to obtain something completely different, like this for example:

Ok, let's start. I assume you dutifully installed XeTeX, XeLaTeX, KOMA-Script and you are ready to follow me. Ready?

Create a .tex file and past the skeleton of the cover letter into it:

At line 1 you are instructing XeLaTeX to load the letter class from KOMA-Script, which will format a nice letter for you. At lines 6,7,8 the destination address is specified. At line 13 the body of the letter. The other parts should be trivial to understand. Basically this is a template for any kind of letter you will write. Nothing difficult indeed. If you process this with XeLaTeX you will get:

Effortlessly we obtained a nice formatted letter. KOMA-Script even added three little dashes on the left border: they are guides to fold the letter with precision. The only thing is missing is the sender address. I could have added the KOMA instructions to set the sender address directly into the tex file, but there's a better method.

The letter document class defined by KOMA-Script support the loading of a setting/style file. In this file, with extension .lco, you can store things like your data (used to compose the sender address) or whatever latex instruction, to change the style for example. In this way the .tex will contain just the letter text and nothing else. This is handy for two reason: 1) you don't have to type your data for each letter you write; 2) you may have more .lco files that you can use to change altogether the look & feel.

So, create a file and call it standard.lco. Stick your data in it, like this:

Change accordingly your .tex file (containing the text of the letter) to instruct KOMA-Script to load the standard.lco file:

I've changed just the first line. Urge yourself to run XeLaTeX to see the results:

The sender address now appears where it is supposed to be. You will notice that KOMA-Script will also add the one-liner version, meant to pop up from the transparent window of the envelope - if any - together with the destination address.

Well, that's all for the first part. There's still lot to explain so please proceed to the second part.

1. Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything [Dostoevskij - Notes From The Underground] [↩]
2. The content is completely fictitious and doesn't necessarily reflect my views [↩]