Looking Out To Sea

I’ve always been quite fond of LaTeX as an environment for composing long text, particularly since you can use whichever text editor you prefer and aren’t tied to any particular user interface. The output is also pretty high quality.

The downsides can’t be ignored, however. The language itself is one of those tales which grew in the telling — the result being a Turing complete macro language which isn’t really designed as a programming language but nor is it a particularly friendly markup language.

Also since most people use the LaTeX system on top of TeX there’s a certain degree to which the two are confused. There is no clean layer of abstraction since you can mix the two freely (to confusing result, in many cases).

Lately I’ve been using LaTeX as a backend for final document production but composing all of the documents themselves in Markdown-formatted text files. The conversion from one to the other comes courtesy of PanDoc, which is frankly the greatest thing since jammy pieces.

I’ve just finished putting together a nice system for writing letters using the two, which I’ve uploaded to GitHub alongside some instructions. The basic idea is that you drop the three files in your ~/bin and the private .pandoc directory. There are a couple of places you should configure to enter your own settings, such as your name and home address.

The result uses the LaTeX “letter” document class to create nice PDFs without you needing to remember how the LaTeX nonsense works. You just type in some basic paragraphs, maybe without formatting of any kind, and the two systems deal with everything for you.

An example:

---
to-name: Santa
to-address: [Santa Claus, Santa's Grotto, The North Pole]
---

I know it's only February but I've been
very good this year and would like to put
in my request early. It would be great if
you could fix those potholes on Leith Walk
because frankly they're beyond a joke.

If you leave out the “to-name” field it uses “Dear Sir or Madam” and closes with “Yours faithfully” automatically. I suppose the next step would be to customise the greeting and closing so you could write less formal letters (“Yours sincerely” is about as friendly as it gets) but that’s not much of a priority. If you’re going to write something casual you can probably write it by hand!

I’ve done a quick test recreating some letters I wrote in the past. Hardly the most rigorous of testing regimes but the principle is proven I think and I’ll definitely be using it in future.