Letter to The Rexx Community

This letter is both a demonstration and a guide to the letter document class in RexxPub. You are reading a Markdown file called letter.md, rendered through the Print pipeline with paged.js pagination --- and the letter you see is the documentation for the format it uses.

Structure of a letter

A RexxPub letter is a Markdown file that uses Pandoc fenced divs to mark the structural elements of the letter. The available sections, in their expected order, are:

• ::::: sender --- the sender's address block, aligned to the right in European style. Use Markdown hard line breaks (\) to separate the lines of the address.
• ::::: date --- the date line, also right-aligned.
• ::::: recipient --- the recipient's address, left-aligned.
• ::::: opening --- the salutation ("Dear...").
• The body of the letter follows as normal Markdown paragraphs, with no special wrapper. Unlike the article class, the letter class uses block letter style: no first-line indent, with paragraphs separated by vertical space.
• ::::: closing --- the valediction ("Sincerely,").
• ::::: signature --- the sender's name, with generous space above for a handwritten signature.
• ::::: enclosure --- an optional enclosure notice, set in a slightly smaller font.
• ::::: cc --- an optional carbon copy list, also in a smaller font.

All sections are optional: a minimal letter needs only an opening, some body text, and a closing. The CSS will simply omit spacing for any section that is not present.

Typography

The letter class shares the same parametric sizing system as the article class. The default size is 12pt Times New Roman, but 10pt and 14pt variants are available through the size parameter (in the query string or on the md2pdf command line).

The main typographic differences from article are:

• Ragged right alignment instead of justified text, which is the conventional style for business correspondence.
• No automatic hyphenation, for the same reason.
• No text-indent --- paragraphs are separated by vertical space (block letter style), not by indentation.
• A slightly more generous line-height (1.30 vs. 1.25) for comfortable reading.
• Narrower margins (2.5 cm vs. 3 cm), giving more usable space on the page.

Page numbers

The first page of a letter has no page number, following the standard convention. If the letter runs to a second page, page numbers appear centred at the bottom, in the same font and size as the body text.

Combining with other features

Because the body of the letter is ordinary Markdown, all the usual RexxPub features are available: Rexx fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting, footnotes, bibliographic references, inline code, and links. This makes the letter class suitable not only for conventional correspondence, but also for technical communications that need to include code samples or references.

For example, this is a Rexx fenced code block inside a letter:

Say "Hello from a letter!"

YAML front matter

Like all RexxPub document classes, the letter class supports reading options from the YAML front matter block. For example, a letter that should always be printed at 10pt can specify this directly in the source:

---
rexxpub:
  size: 10
---

See the YAML front matter documentation for details.

We hope you find the letter class useful. If you have suggestions for improvements, please do not hesitate to let us know.