Guide to LaTeX (4th Edition) (Tools and Techniques

356 Chapter 16. Letters
without a corresponding letter may be printed by including an empty
letter environment of the form
\begin{letter}{recipient}\end{letter}
16.2 A house letter style
The sample letter above demonstrates the possibilities of the standard
L AT E X letter class. The height and width of the text may easily be altered
with appropriate declarations in the preamble. The use of explicit English
words and date style is no problem for other languages since they are all
contained in special commands that can be redefined.
The letter class has been designed so that if the \address command
is omitted, a company letterhead will be printed instead. This presupposes
that the file has been reprogrammed at the local installation for
this purpose. Each employee using this house letter style will have certain
personal entries to make, such as his or her room and/or telephone number.
These commands have been provided for in the standard letter
class.
We have such a house letter style at our institute which we will illustrate
here. However, it was found necessary to add some more personal entries,
such as ‘Our Ref.’, ‘Your Ref.’, and email addresses. In addition, a command
to print out ‘Subject:’ has also been added.
To distinguish our local house style from that of standard L AT E X, we have
named it mpletter. It contains most of the features of letter, since it in
fact reads in that class file and then makes its alterations and additions.
The \address command is not necessary, since all letters are printed with
the institute letterhead, including its address. The recipient’s name and
address are taken from the argument of the letter environment and are
vertically centered in the space provided in the letterhead.
The writer’s name and telephone extension are entered with
\name{author} and \telephone{ext number}
which, if given in the preamble, apply to all the letters in the file. If
different letters have other authors, these commands must be made in
the appropriate letter environment before the \opening command. New
entry commands specific to mpletter are
\yref{your code}
\ymail{your date}
\myref{our code}
\subject{subj text}
which produce the words
Your Ref.:, Your letter of :, Our Ref.:, Subject: