Re: Letters in ConTeXt

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Rolf Marvin Bøe Lindgren wrote:

> the one thing that stops my total conversion to ConTeXt is my lack of
> understanding of, er, context.  I've studied the manual
> "Corresponcence" which presupposes far better understanding of
> ConTeXt than I currently possess.  I imagine though that a useful
> short working example would help.
>
> anyone?

I do not use the m-letter module because it is too complicated for my 
needs. If you think about it, a letter is usually something fairly 
straight-forward. I have a personal p-letter.tex module which does 
something like

<setup layout>

<setup fonts>

<setup subject>

\setuppagenumbering[location={bottom,middle}]

\setupwhitespace[big]
\setupindenting[medium]
\setupblank[big]


Yes, that's it! In the letter, I manually write the typesetting 
commands in the letter

\starttext

\startlines
To,
Whoever ...
....
\stoplines

\blank[3*big]

\startlines
From,
Me ....
\stoplines

\blank[3*big]

Date: \currentdate

\blank[3*big]

\subject Whatever

Dear ...,

\setupindenting[yes,next]

My letter

in differnt paragraphs

\setupindeinting[no]

\blank[2*big]

\startlines
Your Sincerely
\blank[big]
Name...
\stoplines

\stoptext


This is fairly primitive, but I only need to write a formal letter 
once every blue moon, and this setup works for me. If you have more 
frequent need, then you may want more structure in the letters. If you 
can finalize how you want to input your letter, creating a personal 
module is not that hard with ConTeXt. I think that this is one of 
ConTeXt's strongest points. In LaTeX, you first find a package, then 
you see that the package does not do 100% of what you want, then you 
read the code of the package and try to figure out how to make it do 
what you want. With ConTeXt, once you know what you want, it is fairly 
straight forward to write your personal module to achieve that. But of 
course, ConTeXt needs more modules for things like journals and 
conferences which have specific layout requirements.

Aditya