brief-template-lout

Provides a nicely typesetted letter in the Lout document formatting system. It resembles some ideas following the German DIN 5008 standard for (business) letter layouts and should be easy to adopt for your own needs.

Summary

The file brief.lout is the basis file holding the content of your letter, the file mybrief is a modified copy of the Lout setup file for ordinary documents supplied with the Lout installation.

You will have to change mybrief only once when you fill in your contact data.

Letters with Lout

I do not recommend to use the built-in PDF producer from Lout. The best results can be achieved by using ps2pdf:

lout brief.lout > brief.ps && ps2pdf brief.ps

Some examples are provided together with this repository. The final document using Lout's included standard fonts will look like this:

Customization

Although the template is intended for German correspondence, an internationalization should be straightforward. Check the concise Lout user documentation or start tinkering with the sources right away.

Feel free to deploy it as starting point for your own letters.

If you want to use other than the Lout standart fonts, please have a look on addfonts.

Grab a (new) template

The dummy letters were generated with the help of Elizabeth for sourcing some random content. If you have Elizabeth and Python3 installed, you can generate a new dummy letter as a template for your own by typing:

cd gen-dummy/
./randomletter.py

Of course this step is not required and can easly be ignored. Just adopt the available templates mybrief and brief.lout.

Update: Elizabeth has been replaced by Mimesis