LaTeX/C2/Letter-Writing/English-timed
From Script | Spoken-Tutorial
| Time | Narration |
| 00:00 | Welcome to this tutorial on how to write letters using latex. |
| 00:06 | You can see three windows. |
| 00:08 | These correspond to the three distinct phases in typesetting through latex: |
| 00:13 | creation of source file, compilation to produce the pdf file and viewing it through a pdf reader. |
| 00:22 | I am using the free pdf reader “Skim” in Mac OSX because it automatically loads the latest pdf file after every compilation. |
| 00:34 | There are pdf browsers in Linux and also in Windows that have this capability. |
| 00:42 | Let us go through the source file and see what each command does. |
| 00:47 | The first line says that this belongs to 'letter document' class. |
| 00:54 | 12 point is the text size. |
| 00:57 | The first component of the letter is the ‘from address’. It appears between the braces here. |
| 01:07 | The result of this is seen in the top right hand corner of the output file. |
| 01:14 | Two consecutive slashes start a new line. |
| 01:19 | If I remove the double slashes from here – |
| 01:25 | save, compile using pdflatex – |
| 01:37 | you can see that these two lines get merged in one line. |
| 01:43 | Previously with a double slash we asked latex to split the line. |
| 01:49 | Now these reverse slashes are no longer there, so latex does not know that it has to break the line there. |
| 01:56 | Let me put the slashes back. |
| 02:04 | Save, Compile. |
| 02:08 | It is to be understood that after every change we need to save before compilation. |
| 02:15 | Let us see what happens when we give an empty address. |
| 02:21 | Let me just come here, |
| 02:24 | mark it, |
| 02:27 | go to the end of the line, delete it, save it, compile it. |
| 02:37 | You can see that the from address has disappeared from here. |
| 02:44 | Note that today’s date appears automatically in American style: month, date and then year. |
| 02:54 | This is obtained through the command slash date slash today. |
| 03:02 | We can prevent the automatic appearance of the date with an empty list, as we do now. |
| 03:12 | Save. |
| 03:17 | Compile. |
| 03:18 | The date has gone. |
| 03:20 | Suppose that we want to put our own date, let us enter it with date first as follows. |
| 03:30 | 9th July 2007, Save, Compile. |
| 03:40 | Got the date. |
| 03:43 | This is the date on which this tutorial was created the first time. |
| 03:47 | On compiling it, we see this Indian format appearing in the output file. |
| 03:53 | Let us put the address back. |
| 04:02 | And the document is back to the previous state by recompiling. |
| 04:08 | The signature command's argument appears at the bottom of the letter. |
| 04:17 | We begin the document and then the letter. |
| 04:22 | The ‘to address’ comes first. It appears in the top left hand corner of the output. |
| 04:30 | I have addressed this to Mr. N. K. Sinha. |
| 04:34 | The command ‘slash opening’ is used to address the recipient. |
| 04:40 | You may have already noticed that all latex commands begin with a reverse slash. |
| 04:48 | The text of the letter comes next. |
| 04:53 | One starts a new paragraph in latex through a blank line as we show now. |
| 05:00 | Let me come here. Right now this sentence starting at ‘we are’ is here. |
| 05:07 | Let’s open. Let's take this to the next line. |
| 05:12 | I have left a blank line. Let me save this. |
| 05:17 | Compile this. |
| 05:19 | You can see that this has gone to a new paragraph. |
| 05:25 | With a new paragraph, the letter has gone to two pages. |
| 05:29 | Let us see if the font size is reduced to 10, we can bring the letter back to one page. |
| 05:37 | Let me do that now. |
| 05:42 | Save. |
| 05:48 | Compile. |
| 05:49 | You can see that the whole letter has come into one page. |
| 05:54 | Let me put this back to 12 pt. |
| 06:00 | And let me also remove this paragraph bit. |
| 06:06 | And let me compile this. |
| 06:12 | Okay. |
| 06:14 | I now want to explain the itemize environment which is created with a pair of 'begin' and 'end itemize' commands. |
| 06:29 | Every piece of text that starts with a ‘slash item’ appears in a bulleted form. |
| 06:37 | Can I get numbers in the place of bullets here? |
| 06:41 | You just have to change the "itemize" into "enumerate" as I do now. |
| 06:46 | Let me just change this to "enumerate". |
| 06:53 | Save it. |
| 07:00 | Of course! It is always a good idea to save as often as possible. |
| 07:05 | Let me compile this again. |
| 07:09 | You can see that the bullets have become numbers now. |
| 07:15 | In closing, I have included, ‘Yours sincerely’ which comes here. |
| 07:22 | We have already talked about the signature. |
| 07:26 | Finally, the command 'cc' helps mark this letter to other recipients. |
| 07:35 | I end the letter with ‘end letter’ command and then the document is completed with the ‘end document’ command. |
| 07:44 | Feel free to modify the content and try them out. |
| 07:48 | Until you become confident, change only one thing at a time and make sure by immediate compilation that whatever you have done is correct. |
| 07:58 | 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 operating systems. |
| 08:10 | This brings us to the end of this tutorial. |
| 08:13 | Thanks for listening. |
| 08:14 | This is Kannan Moudgalya from CDEEP, IIT Bombay, signing off. Good bye. |
