Hello everyone, I am currently studying in France and I badly want to switch to Lyx from OOo. In order to do this, for a beginning, I would need Lyx to format letters according to the French conventions (at least to visually give this impression to the reader).
I have tried to create a layout file for the lettre class [1] (Letters
and faxes in French), but failed miserably. I imagine that it diverges
too much from its letter ancestor.
To obtain what I needed, I had much more luck with the minimalistic
beletter class [2] (Typeset Belgian letters). As far as I understand,
this is essentially the letter class, with cosmetic changes applied. I
will upload the layout file and letter example as soon as I get access
to the uploading section of the Wiki [3].
However, in order to conform to the French conventions, I need to hack
this very beletter class. Attached you will find the frletter.cls,
frletter.layout and frletter_mockup.lyx (the class, the layout and the
sample document I'm trying tweak to my needs). Please note that in
this mockup, I inserted the date manually as part of the "send to
address", and the subject as part of the "opening" field, while adding
\date{} to the preamble.
This is how I need it hacked: [4]. In words, I would simply need to
keep the "send to address" left-aligned but somewhere next to the
right-edge of the page, and between "my address" and "opening". It
would essentially look and feel like the "my address" field
(screenshot: [5]) from the original letter class, but would be
immediately before the "opening" field.
I would have done this myself. However, I am a complete LaTeX novice.
So far, I managed to hack what I needed through trial and error
(date+location, subject, revert to the "closing" field originally
found in letter). I admit the hacks are ugly, but it works and I'm
fine with it. While the hack described in the previous paragraph is
overwhelming to my knowledge of LaTeX and any help would be highly
appreciated. As far as I understand this should be fairly trivial and
would require some adjustments to the following lines:
% changed the opening
\renewcommand*{\opening}[1]{%
\thispagestyle{firstpage}%
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
\else %if there is a from address
[EMAIL PROTECTED]@{}}%
\fromaddress
\end{tabular}\par%
\fi
[EMAIL PROTECTED]@{}}%
\toname\\ \toaddress
\end{tabular}\par
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Put the date on a line of it's own
% [EMAIL PROTECTED]
\vspace{2\parskip}%
#1\par\nobreak
\vspace{2\parskip}%
}
[1] http://texcatalogue.sarovar.org/entries/lettre.html
[2] http://texcatalogue.sarovar.org/entries/beletter.html
[3] http://wiki.lyx.org/Site/AboutUploading
[4] http://www.geocities.com/landroni/frletter_mockup.png
[5] http://www.geocities.com/landroni/letter_screenshot.png
Regards,
Liviu
frletter.cls
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frletter.layout
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frletter_mockup.lyx
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