Questions: Any (business) letter style and disable page numbering?

[clintolsen]

Hi:

It's probably a silly question, but is there a business letter template yet? I understand Sile is pretty new and may not have that yet.

Also, I tried numbering=no in the \begin attribute section and this didn't seem to get rid of page numbers. I realize I co-opted that from a section describing chapters, so I didn't expect it would work.

begin[papersize=letter,numbering=no]{document}

Thanks,

-Clint

[simoncozens]

Business letter: Not yet, but if you write one I'll commit it. :-)

Folios: The command to turn off folios completely is \nofolios, and the command to turn off folios for one page is \nofoliosthispage. It turns out that this is not documented yet, which is a bug.

[clintolsen]

I can take a crack at it. Should I follow the instructions ~Chapter 9 like with Bringhurst or is there an easier way to go about it?

I was always somewhat unconvinced with LaTeX's letter template. I'm a block-style guy myself.

[simoncozens]

The chapter 9 instructions should be fine, but you may find it easier to have a look at the other classes and modify one of them.

I never know what a letter class is meant to do, to be honest. Maybe my letters are not typographically sophisticated enough.

[clintolsen]

OK, if you could give me a target class to consult, that'd be great. I don't currently have the git repo checked out. It sounds like I may have to do this if I really want to dig into it.

So, letters don't have to be super fancy, but they have some pretty basic elements: A date, a sender address, a receiver address, a greeting, a body, and often a salutation. The LaTex template I think made template arguments out of the sender and receiver. Maybe it auto-generated the date. I'd have to go look.

There are some variations documented here: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/653/01 for example. In there they have suggested top margins and distances between some elements.

Nothing is stopping you from doing this by hand of course, but if there was something that sped up the process a little that would be helpful.

[alerque]

See also #455.

[simoncozens]

I've started you off with classes/letter.lua. See what else you want it to do (and see the example in tests/letter.sil). Let me know if there are things you want it to do but can't get working.

[clintolsen]

OK, I just tried to sync the HEAD with sile using brew, and it didn't update anything. I'm still new to brew. Do I have to use git manually to get this?

[simoncozens]

I don't know, I'm sorry. But if you just want to grab the file and put it into your classes directory it's at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simoncozens/sile/master/classes/letter.lua

[alerque]

@clintolsen when you did the brew install did you brew install sile or did you run brew install sile --HEAD? The former would give you the last released version and the latter would fetch the latest version from the source repository. You should be able to tell by running sile --version which would either tell you something like 0.9.4 (the last release) or 0.9.5-unreleased (which would indicate you have a version from HEAD at whatever time you installed it).

[clintolsen]

I did run brew install --debug sile --HEAD and it says that:

Warning: sile-HEAD-6dd57bd_2 already installed

I do have 0.9.5-unreleased as my version but I don't think this represents the HEAD on github.

I'm looking at my install for classes in /usr/local/share/sile/classes and I don't see letter.lua.

[simoncozens]

So it looks like you installed the git version as of a few weeks ago, and Homebrew is now happy that you have a git version and doesn't want to install it again; it's just that the git HEAD has moved on. You could uninstall and reinstall, but if you want to work on stuff you may find it easier to work on a git checkout directly.

[clintolsen]

I performed a reinstall, and this seemed to have worked. Before I saw:

Warning: sile-HEAD-6dd57bd_2 already installed

Now if I install again, I see:

Warning: sile-HEAD-bd8111d_2 already installed

And letter.lua is there now. I have to admit I'm pretty underwhelmed with how brew works. It's not clear to me why reinstalling is better than having some kind of install --force (which apparently has been removed from brew).

[simoncozens]

Yeah, I think the --HEAD support is a bad hack, but it does its job: "Just give me the version of this as of now."

Please note that the letter.sil example relies on a command I only just committed to plain.lua:

\define[command=cr]{\hfill\break}%

[Omikhleia]

Unless @clintolsen wants to add something to it, @simoncozens had included a "letter" basic class to SILE in 2017 - Was there anything else that prevented this old issue to be closed?

[alerque]

Happy to re-evalute if there is something missing.