Letters with Pandoc

Letter-writing season is around the corner. I recently adapted this pandoc workflow for generating PDF letters by only editing a markdown file. I only made the following minor changes to the original:

For this to work you will need pandoc and a TeX distribution installed. For a full-fledged TeX distribution check out something like MacTeX and for a minimal variation, see TinyTeX.

1. Included the fontawesome5 package so I could add icons alongside the phone number, email, and website in the letterhead.

2. Changed ThisULCornerWallPaper to CenterWallPaper and added wpYoffset and wpXoffset so I could get a left margin on the logo (I suppose this could also be done by offsetting the logo in the letterhead.pdf file).

Here’s what the output looks like with some random sample content:

Sample letter produced with the pandoc workflow

The markdown is very simple to edit — most of the information is up in the YAML header, and it looks like this:

author: Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky
city: Moscow
from:
- By the Vladimirkirche
- care of Pryanischnikof, Grafengasse.
affiliation1: Add an affiliation
affiliation2: Potential Additional Information
contact: 
- \faPhone \ +91 79 1234 1729
- \faGlobe \ https://www.google.com
- \faEnvelope \ nobody@nowhere.com
to:
- Michael
- Someplace
- with an address
subject: An Update
salutation: My dearest
toname: brother
customdate: 1838-8-9

Write the body of the letter in markdown as usual, and generate the PDF by running:

pandoc letter.md -o output.pdf --template=template.tex --pdf-engine=xelatex

or have a makefile that looks like this:

TEX = pandoc
FLAGS = --pdf-engine=xelatex

src1 = template.tex letter.txt
op1 = output

all : $(op1).pdf

$(op1).pdf : $(src1)
    $(TEX) $(filter-out $<,$^ ) -o $@ --template=$< $(FLAGS)

For your first use, you would want to update the images for the letterhead and the signature, and optionally customize the fonts to your liking. Fork this repo to make your own!