Bug#92703: document class 'letter' doesn't understand \opening

[Adrian van den Dries <az@i7.com.au>]

(Last email had an error, I'm sorry.)

I'm sorry, my bug report was lacking. Indeed, I had the
\documentclass{letter} and preamble.

Here is my document:

  \documentclass{letter}
  \signature{Adrian van den Dries}
  \address{My Home}
  
  \begin{document}{Her Home}
  
  \opening{Dear Ma,}
  
  Hello there!
  
  \closing{Regards,}
  
  \end{document}

Here is my output:

  $ latex letter
  This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.3.1)
  (letter.tex
  LaTeX2e <1999/12/01> patch level 1
  Babel <v3.6Z> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german,
  ngerman, n
  ohyphenation, loaded.
  (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/letter.cls
  Document Class: letter 1999/04/29 v1.2z Standard LaTeX document class
  (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/size10.clo)) (letter.aux)
  ! Undefined control sequence.
  \opening ...ace {2\parskip }{\raggedright \toname 
                                                    \\ \toaddress \par
  }\vspac...
  l.7 \opening{Dear Ma,}
                        
  ? 

So, as maintainers of the latex-doc package, your best recommendation is to
buy a book?

Thanks

a.

<quote author="Steve M. Robbins"
       subject="Re: Bug#92703: document class 'letter' doesn't understand \opening"
       date="Tue, 03 Apr 2001 09:40:13 +0000">

> I'm guessing that the letter class documentation writer was intending
> that it be read by someone already familiar enough with latex to know
> that you need to wrap the example inside 
> \documentstyle{}\begin{document} ... \end{document},
> as you do with _all_ latex documents, regardless of the class.
> 
> In fact, that's what it says directly above the part you quoted.
> 
> I don't think this is a bug.
> 
> But if you can re-write the page to be more clear, a patch would
> almost certainly be appreciated.
> 
> 
> -S

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