On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 9:50 AM, Willi Egger
Hi Wolfgang,
First of all thanks for this initiative! - Until now I composed a letter based on a "template" I build one day. Nothing special though.
I started also with mayn hard coded values and only a few parameters and replaced part by part.
- Still a module which would allow for writing letters and quotes consistently would make live easier. As I am living in the Netherlands, we use commonly block-style letters. Will your module provide the possibility to use a header on the first page and e.g. a smaller something in the margin on the second and following pages? Will your module provide page-numbering switched on beginning at the second page if the document is longer than 1 page? - This last point is in my environment always a struggle...
Very easy to do with ConTeXt because you could define different layouts for every page and what I do is to set the headerheight for the first page to 0pt and set it to another value like 1cm on the second page. You could now write the pagenumber as headertext because there is no header on the first page and the pagenumber will start on the second page.
The Dutch TeX users group has released on CTAN a ntgclass.zip (LaTeX). There are three articles which might help to "enlighten" you. Unfortunately two of the three articles are written in Dutch (briefdoc.pdf, brief.pdf). In case you intend to include ideas contained in this NEN-1026 style letter I am happy to help you translating the important parts of those articles.
Can you show me a few example letters with values for all fields, I saw a few in Hans letter documentation [1] and the works depends on one point, is the height and position for the reference and address block fixed or did it depend on the content. If the fields have a fixed height it is easy to write a style file but if the height depends on the content a need a little bit more time and I will implement it in a proper way, I have this problem also with american block style and a solution should be integrated in a consistent way with the rest of the module.
I am looking forward to your module
I still wait for comments about the user interface to set the values before I will release my module to the public although my last stable version is only available. Greetings Wolfgang [1] http://www.pragma-ade.com/show-man-29.htm