Re: Tool for document management

[Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 01:31:57AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:

> On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:31:32 -0400, Douglas A Tutty
> <dtutty@porchlight.ca> said:  
> 
> > Here's my personal letter template.  I copy it to the correct file
> > name, edit it, then latex it.  The letter text itself is just plain
> > text.
> 
> 
> > \documentclass[letterpaper,12pt]{article}
> > %preamble here
> > \begin{document}
> > % no page number on this first page
> > \thispagestyle{empty} \begin{flushleft} Douglas A. Tutty\\ xxx
> > xxxxxxxxx, RR. x\\ xxxxxx, ON xxx xxx\\ Ph: (xxx) xxx--xxxx\\ Email:
> > dtutty@porchlight.ca\\ \end{flushleft}
> 
> > \noindent \today
> 
> > \bigskip
[...]
> 
> --8<---------------cut here------------letter_template------------->8---
> 
> \documentclass[12pt]{letter}
> \usepackage[dvips]{graphicx}
> \usepackage{times}
> \pagestyle{empty}
> \usepackage[margin=1in, head=0.25in, headsep=0.25in, nofoot]{geometry}
> \setlength{\topmargin}{0pt}
> \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0pt}
> \setlength{\headheight}{0pt}
> \setlength{\headsep}{0pt}
> \setlength{\footskip}{5pt}
> \setlength{\textheight}{9.0in}
> \setlength{\textwidth}{6.5in}
> 
> \address{Manoj Srivastava\\
> 229 Brandon Lane\\
> Woodbury, TN 37190}
[...]

Thanks, guys.  I have been doing the same sort of thing -- in more
complex templates -- for some years.  I've always felt it was a bit
clumsy to finish up with all these files cluttering up my nice clean
directories.  So now you have spurred me into writing a script to take
a given letter -- just the bit from the address to the end of the
content -- and add the template letterhead, the date, and the closing,
put the heading in bold, then latex, dvips, save a tagline on the
original body file to say which template was used, what date, and what
style of closing, clean up the intermediate files and make tea.

Well, I nearly did it too, but I couldn't persuade bash to stop
stripping out backslashes, so I've started again in perl. Nearly there
now.  So thanks for the stimulation.  I've been putting this off for
years.  Now I'll be able to write letters mostly in plain text. :-)

But it doesn't yet make tea...
-- 
richard