Tech-stuff Personal · 17 May 2008 ·
LaTeX: It's easier than you think
Using the g-brief letter class in LaTeX I encountered a problem—which wasn’t a problem after all.
Today I had to write a more or less formal letter in English. I used to use OpenOffice Writer for that purpose until a couple of months ago, when I started using LaTeX (Not to be confused with Latex) LaTeX has many advantages over WYSIWYG editors, like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice. Documents produced by LaTeX often look much better and it is much more rigid with the layout. Also, its “What you get is what you mean” approach ensures that you get the best layout for your document. This is why I started using it for my essays and assignments, although I am not doing a hard science like Physics, which would benefit from LaTeX’s abilities to express mathematical terms and equations.
Well, I have written a couple of formal letters in German before and my preferred package was a variation of g-brief, called g-brief-jit (particularly useful for German freelancers who have to include their tax number). G-brief is an environment for German letters and it is in my opinion the most elegant LaTeX letter class for that purpose.
However, I encountered a problem with my current letter: It was in English. Therefore, all the labels (like “date”) were in German! I tried out other letter document classes, like the original letter, but found them to be inappropriate. So I decided to rewrite g-brief and tried to figure out how to do it. It took me a while to find the files needed. So I started translating g-brief—but then I noticed that it already had English-language options! Therefore, instead of rewriting the entire package, it was sufficient to add “english” to the document class of the letter—and the entire document was just the way I wanted!
That’s easy!
Interestingly, the g-brief documentation on ctan, reads: “can also be used for English (by those who can read the documentation)”
Damn it!
It’s always best to consult the manual before messing with technology. Additionally, i figured out that LaTeX is actually much easier to use than I thought. Apart from being truly beautiful.
Hah.
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Other comments
Louise wrote on 15 April 2010, 22:34
Hi,
Do you happen to know how to reduce the space between the address of the company and the date in g-brief?
Tried altering g-brief.cls but cannot find a parameter that reduces this space.
Thanks,
-Louise
Robert wrote on 20 October 2010, 10:05
Thanks for the blog post! I was looking for an English equivalent of g-brief and it seemed too simple that g-brief can be used for English letters as well. This blog post saved me a lot of time. By the way, the original letter class looks really odd compared to g-brief, indeed.
Thanks,
Robert