Letterhead for Pandoc

After meaning to for years, I finally sat down and made a Pandoc letterhead template. More accurately, I needed one for a support letter I was writing and I adapted this template from Scott Hartley.

If you aren’t familiar with Markdown, Pandoc, and LaTeX, that’s fine (better, probably): just close this tab and wait 2 years for my next post. If you aren’t familiar but you are a social scientist, it might be worth skimming Kieran Healy’s Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science.

If you are familiar, you can grab the template from Github. You’ll need to structure your letter a bit to make sure all of the requisite parts get included. Specifically, you’ll want to include a metadata block at the top of your letter and include the right header info.

Here’s the metadata block:

---
size: 11pt
sig:
 include: yes
 sign: yes
 post: yes
cc:
---

Size is the font size. 11pt is pretty good, 12 starts to get a bit big.

There are several signature options in the sig chunk. Each of these can be turned off by leaving them blank or turned on by adding any text to the line.

• include: should the signature block (i.e., the “Sincerely”, signature image, and job title) be included?
• sign: should the signature image be included?
• post: should my job title printed after my name?

cc: any text here will be rendered in a cc line at the end of the letter.

Here’s the header:

| Someone
| 123 Some St.
| Anywhere, IN 12345

\today prints today’s date and the lines prefaced with | create the address block for the recipient.

That’s about it. Call that template from Pandoc when you’re converting to pdf and you’ll have a nicely formatted letter, ready to go!