[texhax] LaTeX - sample letters

[cga2000]

On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 07:41:55AM EDT, William Adams wrote:
> 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.
> 
after spending an inordinate amount of time staring at the samples
provided by a couple of showcases exemplifying a wide variety of
document types available on the www 

-- I'm not sure I am the right person for the job. 

My feeling is that for the showcase to be of general interest it would
need to include samples of letters in all major languages -- not limited
to western European but including also Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew,
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.

Sounds like this would require a collaborative effort on the part of a
few good men and someone with a rather vast experience of TeX/LaTeX in
the driving seat.

> > 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.
> 
Presumably the word "package" now evokes different connotations than it
did when the LaTeX vocabulary was set in stone.

> 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 have a vague feeling the way the debian packaging system handles LaTeX
doesn't help.  There is a "maint" mailing list that presumably addresses
packaging issues and I need to take a look at its archives to see if it's
worth subscribing to.

> > 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.
> 
TeXLive indeed looks like a nice clean way of bypassing the debian
packaging layer without impacting your system. 

Thanks

cga