writing a letter in LaTeX

[Roy C Bixler <rcb@press-gopher.uchicago.edu>]

Hi:

I tried using Lyx to write a letter and, in the end, had to resort to
Star Office 5 because of an apparent bug in LaTeX.  The Lyx output
looked fine, but LaTeX did not include either the 'from' or 'to'
addresses in the output DVI file.  I was pretty shocked by this, since
a long time back when I was an Atari ST user, I had LaTeX set up there
as my word processor and never had a problem like this.

My setup is a current (as of 30 Nov) 'slink' distribution.  Here is what I
have installed:

p2 14:11 press-rcb[152] dpkg --list tetex\*
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name            Version        Description
+++-===============-==============-============================================
ii  tetex-base      0.9.981030-2   basic teTeX library files
ii  tetex-bin       0.9.981031-3   teTeX binary files
pn  tetex-dev       <none>         (no description available)
pn  tetex-doc       <none>         (no description available)
ii  tetex-extra     0.9.981030-2   extra teTeX library files
pn  tetex-french    <none>         (no description available)
ii  tetex-nonfree   0.9.981030-2   non-free teTeX library files
pn  tetex-src       <none>         (no description available)

p2 14:29 press-160[153] dpkg --list lyx\*                                     ~
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name            Version        Description
+++-===============-==============-============================================
ii  lyx             0.12.0.final-0 High Level Word Processor (BETA version)

Here is a sample document I could reproduce the problem with:

\documentclass{letter}
\begin{document}
\address{John Jones\\ 123 A St.\\ Anytown, AW AB3 4AA}
\begin{letter}{Mr. Joe Smith\\ 2345 Princess St.
\\ Edinburgh, EH1 1AA}
   Each letter is a `letter' environment, whose argument is the name
and address of the recipient.  For example, you might have:
\end{letter}
\end{document}

If I run 'latex test.tex', the DVI once again is missing the address
information.

Is this a bug or do I just have a messed up installation?

Thanks,

---
Roy Bixler
The University of Chicago Press
rcb@press-gopher.uchicago.edu