LaTeX/C2/Letter-Writing/English-timed
From Script | Spoken-Tutorial
| Time | Narration |
|---|---|
| 0:00 | Welcome to this tutorial on how to write letters using latex |
| 0:06 | You can see three windows: |
| 0:08 | These correspond to the three distinct phases in typesetting through latex: |
| 0:13 | creation of source file, compilation to produce the pdf file and viewing it through a pdf reader. |
| 0:22 | I am using the free pdf reader “Skim” in Mac OSX because it automatically loads the latest pdf file after every compilation. |
| 0:34 | There are pdf browers in Linux and also in windows that have this capability. |
| 0:42 | Let us go through the source file and see what each command does. |
| 0:47 | The first line says that this belongs to letter document class. |
| 0:54 | 12 point is the text size. |
| 0:57 | The first component of the letter is the ‘from address’. It appears between the braces here |
| 1:07 | The result of this is seen in the top right hand corner of the output file. |
| 1:14 | Two consecutive slashes start a new line. |
| 1:19 | If I remove the double slashes from here – |
| 1:25 | save, compile using pdflatex – |
| 1:37 | you can see that these two lines get merged in one line. |
| 1:43 | Previously with a double slash we asked latex to split the line. |
| 1:49 | Now these reverse slashes are no longer there, so latex does not know that it has to break the line there. |
| 1:56 | Let me put the slashes back. |
| 2:04 | Save, Compile. |
| 2:08 | It is to be understood, that after every change we need to save before compilation. |
| 2:15 | Let us see what happens when we give an empty address. |
| 2:21 | Let me just come here, |
| 2:24 | mark it, |
| 2:27 | go to the end of the line, delete it, save it, compile it. |
| 2:37 | You can see that the from address has disappeared from here. |
| 2:44 | Note that today’s date appears automatically in American style: month, date and then year. |
| 2:54 | This is obtained throught the command slash date slash today. |
| 3:02 | We can prevent the automatic appearance of the date with an empty list, as we do now. |
| 3:12 | Save. |
| 3:17 | Compile. |
| 3:18 | The date has gone. |
| 3:20 | Suppose that we want to put our own date, let us enter it with date first as follows. |
| 3:30 | 9th July 2007, Save, Compile. |
| 3:40 | Got the date. |
| 3:43 | This is the date on which this tutorial was created the first time. |
| 3:47 | On compiling it, we see this Indian format appearing in the output file. |
| 3:53 | Let us put the address back. |
| 4:02 | And the document is back to the previous state by recompiling. |
| 4:08 | The signature commands argument appears at the bottom of the letter. |
| 4:17 | We begin the document and then the letter. |
| 4:22 | The ‘to address’ comes first. It appears in the top left hand corner of the output. |
| 4:30 | I have addressed this to Mr. N. K. Sinha. |
| 4:34 | The command ‘slash opening’ is used to address the recipient. |
| 4:40 | You may have already noticed that all latex commands begin with a reverse slash. |
| 4:48 | The text of the letter comes next. |
| 4:53 | One starts a new paragraph in latex through a blank line as we show now. |
| 5:00 | Let me come here. Right now this sentence starting at ‘we are’ is here. |
| 5:07 | Let’s open. Let's take this to the next line. |
| 5:12 | I have left a blank line. Let me save this. |
| 5:17 | Compile this. |
| 5:19 | You can see that this has gone to a new paragraph |
| 5:25 | With a new paragraph, the letter has gone to two pages. |
| 5:29 | Let us see if the font size is reduced to 10, we can bring the letter back to one page. |
| 5:37 | Let me do that now |
| 5:42 | Save. |
| 5:48 | Compile. |
| 5:49 | You can see that the whole letter has come to one page. |
| 5:54 | Let me put this back to 12 pt. |
| 6:00 | And let me also remove this paragraph bit. |
| 6:06 | And let me compile this. |
| 6:12 | Okay. |
| 6:14 | I now want to explain the itemize environment which is created with a pair of begin and end itemize commands. |
| 6:29 | Every piece of text that starts with a ‘slash item’ appears in a bulleted form. |
| 6:37 | Can I get numbers in the place of bullets here? |
| 6:41 | You just have to change the itemize into enumerate as I do now. |
| 6:46 | Let me just change this to enumerate. |
| 6:53 | Save it. |
| 7:00 | Of course! It is always a good idea to save as often as possible. |
| 7:05 | Let me compile this again. |
| 7:09 | You can see that the bullets have become numbers now. |
| 7:15 | In closing, I have included, ‘Yours sincerely’, which comes here. |
| 7:22 | We have already talked about the signature. |
| 7:26 | Finally, the command cc helps mark this letter to other recipients. |
| 7:35 | I end the letter with ‘end letter’ command and then the document is completed with the ‘end document’ command. |
| 7:44 | Feel free to modify the content and try them out. |
| 7:48 | Until you become confident, change only one thing at a time and make sure by immediate compilation that whatever you have done is correct. |
| 7:58 | Although I talked about the letter writing process in a Mac, the same source file will work in all Latex systems including those in Linux and Windows operation systems. |
| 8:10 | This brings us to the end of this tutorial. |
| 8:13 | Thanks for listening. |
| 8:14 | This is ---------------(your name) from ---------------------(Affiliation and name of the place) signing off. Good bye. |
