Minimalia

This is the sixth part of the tutorial Cover letter with style. You can find the fifth part here.

In this part I will show you how to add a barcode in the destination address. It's a kind of nerdy, but it will serve to illustrate how to do graphics stuff easily with XeLaTex. For the purpose, you have to install pstricks and let Xe(La)Tex know about it.

Installing pstricks is very easy on ubuntu: just open a terminal and issue the command:

sudo apt-get install texlive-pstricks

Then, we need to inform Xe(La)Tex where to find the pstricks configuration file for the xdvipdfmx driver (this is the driver XeLaTex uses to output your pdf). To do so, first create a couple of directories

mkdir -p /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/xetex/xetex-pstricks/
mkdir -p /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/xelatex/xetex-pstricks/

Then you need to copy this pstricks.con file in those directories. You need also to copy this xdvipdfmx.con file in

/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/pstricks

To finish, run

sudo texhash

All this, to have graphics in your pdf's in just one go, through XeLaTex. For those who are not fully aware of the problem, I just saved you from this mess:

Consider also that the above instructions are done once for all. After this setup, we are ready to use pstricks packages.

So, for drawing a barcode we can use pst-barcode. It is pretty easy to use and its documentation says it all.

This time, instead of changing the template file (standard.lco, remember?) I will change the letter itself, because the destination address is in there. So here it is the letter with the barcode added

At line 3 I import the package and at line 11 I specify a royalmail barcode, coding the number 1234567 (just an example). If you typeset the document, you will obtain this

Cool, isnt' it? Further, we can adjust the barcode position, specifing the optional parameters, transx and transy

\psbarcode[transy=-0.2cm,transx=0.1cm]{1234567}{}{royalmail}

The result now is

The entire cover letter, finally, appears like that

Well, it was a long journey but now we got a stylish cover letter to show off. I hope you like it.

I am still not done! I have to show one thing more: an alternative template you can use to completely change the look and feel of your cover letter. Keeping the template separated from the content permits us to easily swap style as changing one line only.

First of all, I will provide you a new template.

I won't explain the details. Moreover, this template was not created by me: I just copied (and somewhat simplified) the template shown in this document [Replacing LATEX2# standard classes with KOMA-Script by Yuri Robbers, Markus Kohm and Rasmus Pank Roulund].

Save the above template in alternate.lco file. Also, check the line 22, where the name of your logo should be specified. Now take your cover letter and in the first line specifiy you want to use this alternative template, like this

That's all. I just changed the first line, instructing KOMA-Script to load the alternate file (no need to specify the .lco extension). If you typeset the document, your cover letter now will look like this

Mind that the logo was not the one I used in the previous part. I edited it to have the outlines in stronger colors (it has to be in the foreground, this time)

So, I hope you enjoyed the tutorial. And I hope you can sport those cover letters in the next job application; maybe they will give you more points, who knows....

See you in seven years

This is the fifth part of the tutorial Cover letter with style. You can find the fourth part here.

In this part I will show you how to add your logo as a watermark to your cover letter¹

Ok, ready to go. Well...almost: you need a logo. For this time, I will provide one (Save link as...) so you can proceed with the tutorial. It is a simple vectorial image, edited with Inkscape. If you don't have Inkscape installed, you already know what to do:

sudo apt-get install inkscape

Actually, if you are able to, I suggest to compile and install Inkscape from the svn sources, but it is not mandatory.

Another thing you need is to install a couple of fonts in a way the logo will look like as I designed. The fonts are: Diavlo and Fontin. Designed by Jos Buivenga, they are free to use. I already explained how to install new fonts in linux, so I won't bother you further.

Once the fonts and Inkscape are installed, grab the svg sample logo I made for you. Launch Inkscape, open the file and customize a little bit. For example, you could select the name

replace it and then adjust the its displacement with ALT+(arrows up/down/left/right) which are the keys to adjust the font tracking and kerning in Inkscape. There's a plenty of Inkscape tutorials out there, so I am confident you will come up with a decent logo for yourself.

For the moment, I suggest you to do just little changes and save the file as Encapsulated Postscript (.eps). Before saving, Inkscape shows you this dialog:

There's only one option you should change: enable the "Convert texts to paths". What it does is converting... well, text into vectorial outlines (so font informations are then discarded) If you don't check that option, acrobat reader will consider text as text in your final pdf document. In brief, it will make the text selectable, like this

And, in general, you don't want that happening for a background image, don't you?

Anyway, now you should have your beautiful logo, says sample_logo_transparent.eps. A little digression: for the name of my logo I used the word transparent, but the eps's don't really support transparency. If you go back to Inkscape and look carefully at the fill properties:

you will notice that the opacity is 100% and the color of the outlines is just a light gray, giving the impression, in the final document, of transparency. At first one could think to use indeed opacity parameter and save the logo as pdf (which supports transparency) but the final result is awful.

The above picture is not a screenshot gone bad, it is the actual result if you try to import the image as pdf (supporting transparency) instead of an encapsulated postscript (which doesn't support transparency, so you are forced to fake using light colors). If someone obtains better results in importing images as pdf's, let me know, please. End of digression.

Ok, time is come to add our picture as the page background. For the purpose I will use a tiny package called eso-pic.

At line 6 I imported the package and at line 62 I added the background picture, which is defined in lines 51-59. The command \BackgroundPicture will put a box big as the entire page. Inside the box, the image, centered orizontally (with \centering) and vertically (with a pair of enclosing \vfill)

Finally! Let's run xelatex and see the result:

Our mighty page came to life. Hope you like it. Happy experimenting.

Click here for the last part of the tutorial.

1. Note that in this part of the tutorial there is nothing specific to XeLaTex, so ideally you can use these instructions to add a watermark also to plain Latex documents. [↩]

This is the fourth part of the tutorial Cover letter with style. You can find the third part here.

After the header, I will take care of the footer. To change the default I will use the \firstfoot command. Basically it works like \firsthead, so I have nothing special to add. I will update the template with:

At line 39 I've declared my new footer. I wanted the material in the footer to be centered (line 40) and I've read the content of the variable fromaddress and used it as the first line, then the break line (\\) and then the email and phone (also read from the corresponding variables). The result is the following:

There's a problem with the way I declared the fromaddress: to have KOMA-Script rendering my address on three lines, I used the break line command (\\) but now I would like a one-liner address in the footer. I could declare yet another variable, this time avoiding to put the line breaks, but it will be an ugly duplication. Instead, I will use \renewcommand{}{}. As first parameter it takes the command to be redefined and as second parameter you declare the new material to use instead. Well, let's proceed:

First of all, I enclose the first line in curly braces (line 41 and 44). In this way the effect of \renewcommand will remain local and will not affect the entire document. At line 42 I redefine the meaning of the \\ command, specifying it has to be replaced by a dot. That's all. Let's look at the result

So, only for the first line in the footer, the line breaks in my address were replaced by a dot. Now just enlarge the dots and add some space before and after them:

Look carefully at line 42. First of all, I used the escaped space (a backslash followed by a white space) to instruct TeX to put literally two spaces around the dot. Without escaping the spaces, TeX will happily swallow them. Secondly, I applied the \large modifier to the dot character and I enclosed in curly braces (otherwise the trailing space would be enlarged too). The result will be the following

Nice, we have our address on one line now. It's time to take care of the second line. For the email and the phone contacts, I will use a couple of symbols from the marvosym package. The template so becomes:

At line 5 I included the marvosym package; the rest is happening at line 46. Nothing special: I used the enlarged version of the symbols \Letter and \Telefon. I also used an escaped space to keep the email address separated from the telephone number.

Now, the final touch: I will letterspace the entire footer and use the small caps. So, here it is:

Basically I just added the line 42. The result?

Quite a long journey for a fucking footer, but we're done and I hope you will like the final result so far. Please mind that the above screenshot was made smaller in respect of the others. To see the footer in respect of the entire page, here it is the last picture

I think it is already quite a good letter, but in the next part we will watermark our logo.