3. ⁎Correspondence
This chapter covers writing letters (including mail merging), envelope labels and faxes. [Letters and the like] There are a number of classes you can use for this purpose. See, for example, the letter topic. (If you're writing in German, you may want to consider dinbrief [8].)
For brevity, this book will only look at four such classes:
- letter
- This is one of the base LaTeX classes
that comes with all TeX distributions. It's not very flexible, but
it's simple to use and may suit your purposes if you're happy with
the default layout. Since it's one of the base classes, it's stable
and shouldn't conflict with common packages.
- scrlttr2
- This is one of the KOMA-Script classes and is
included here because the first two volumes in this series looked at
other classes in that bundle. This is more complicated to use than
letter but is more flexible. At the time of writing this, the
current version of the scrlttr2 class is 3.14 (2014-10-28).
- newlfm
- This class is less flexible than scrlttr2
but can also be used for memos (see §6.1 Memos) and
faxes. At the time of writing this, the current version of the
newlfm class is dated 2009-04-11.
- isodoc
- This class is more flexible than newlfm but
less complicated than scrlttr2 and can also be used to write
invoices (see §4.1 Writing an Invoice Using the isodoc Class). At the time of
writing this, the current version of the isodoc class is
1.06 (2014-07-26).
⚠
Note that it's usually considered inappropriate to have
floats within a letter, so letter-style classes, such as
letter, scrlttr2 and newlfm, don't define the
figure or table environments. You can, however,
just use a tabular environment. In this case, you might
want to place the tabular environment within the
center environment to centre it and produce a small
vertical gap above and below. The isodoc class inherits the
figure and table environments from the
underlying base article class, but that kind of floating
material is liable to interfere with the fixed blocks such as the
address information.
This book is also available as A4 PDF or 12.8cm x 9.6cm PDF or paperback (ISBN 978-1-909440-07-4).