eddelbuettel / Linl

linl: Linl is not Letter

Motivation

The LaTeX Letter class is very useful for simple letters. As such letters are also somewhat standardized, they make for excellent candidates for use by Markdown.

This package leans on earlier work by Aaron Wolen in his pandoc-letter repository, and extends it for use from R via the rmarkdown package.

Example

Skeleton

The skeleton creates a very simple letter. This shows the (complete) source on the left and the rendered pdf on the right:

Several formatting defaults for font, fontsize, indentation are in use. See help(linl) for a complete list and default values.

Vignette

The vignette example is a little more featureful and shows how to include a letterhead on-demand, a signature, and a few formatting settings. All of these are driven by simple YAML headers as seen on the left:

The vignette also contains the few lines of vignette metadata one would exclude from a normal letter.

Status

The package is fully working, and on CRAN.

Usage

As the package is on CRAN, you can use the standard

install.packages("linl")

to install it from CRAN, and then use as a Markdown template via RStudio, or use code such as

library(rmarkdown)
draft("myletter.Rmd", template="pdf", package="linl", edit=FALSE)
render("myletter.Rmd")

to create a first draft of a new myletter.Rmd.

Interim and test versions may also appear on the ghrr drat repo from which they can be installed via one additional line as in

drat:::addRepo("ghrr")     # registers the ghrr drat repo
install.packages("linl")   # installs linl from ghrr

Once installed, the above code examples should work as expected.

Requirements

Beyond the R package dependencies, a working pandoc binary is needed. RStudio installs its own copy, otherwise do what is needed on your OS (i.e., something like sudo apt-get install pandoc pandoc-citeproc).

See Also

• binb: Binb is not Beamer: Stylish pdf Presentations from RMarkdown
• pinp: Pinp is not PNAS: Snazzy one-or two column short papers or vignettes
• tint: tint is not tufte: Beautiful pdf or html handout or writeups

Authors

Dirk Eddelbuettel and Aaron Wolen.

License

GPL-3 for this package, the work in pandoc-letter, as well as underlying Pandoc template.