For some time I have been unhappy with the letter classes
available from LyX. The standard letter conforms to US conventions
and is not the way we do it in New Zealand.
The letter(german) would not work for me. But g-brief-en worked
and was the closest to what we want in NZ.
So I ventured to try to customise a NZ letter class. So far progress
is pleasing.
My system is Redhat Linux 6.2
1. I created a new directory og in /usr/share/texmf/base/tex/latex
2. I copied g-brief.cls and g-brief.sty from g-brief into og and
renamed then nzletter.cls and nzletter.sty
3. Editing the nzletter.xxx files I changed g-brief to nzletter
throughout.
4. I ran the command texhash
5. Changing to /usr/share/lyx/layouts, I copied g-brief-en.layout to
nzletter.layout and altered the DeclareLatexClass and LatexName
statements from g-brief to nzletter.
6. In LyX I ran the Options->Reconfigure option, exited, and restarted
LyX.
Brilliant! On restarting LyX, the Layouts->Document->Class pulldown
now showed: letter(nzletter).
At this point I was now able to use the nzletter class and produce a
letter according the g-brief-en conventions.
Subsequent editing of nzletter.cls worked without any further need for
texhash or the LyX Reconfigure option.
The hard part is now understanding the (entirely uncommented)
g-brief-en.cls file. I have the books (by Lamport, Goossens, et alii)
but the .cls file uses things like picture(0,0) in undocumented ways.
This seems to produce a picture environment of zero dimensions! with
everything placed in it with \put(x,y) statements actually placed
"outside" the picture.
I have discovered a mysterious world of ifx, ifcase, ..
and similar statements not documented in any of my latex books or
in gentle.tex (found on a CTAN site). I have ordered the TeX Book
and eagerly await its delivery. (If only K&R had written the LaTeX
books!)
I now realise that I should have started from akletter.cls which I
subsequently found on the UK CTAN which is beautifully commented and
amusingly written.
I would be delighted to receive advice, encouragement, discouragement
etc from anyone who has similarly ventured in this direction -
invoices, memos, faxes etc are on my agenda.
John O'Gorman
Auckland, New Zealand
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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