[5213] in SIPB bug reports
Re: latex letter mode
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Albert Dvornik)
Fri Mar 17 22:31:06 1995
From: "Albert Dvornik" <bert@MIT.EDU>
To: mjacknis@MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU, bug-newtex@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: mjacknis@mit.edu's message of 17 Mar 1995 (03:36:21 EST).
<9503170836.AA10817@w20-575-39.MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 22:30:36 EST
(First of all, letter.sty lives on the Athena system packs, and not in
the SIPB or newtex lockers. This means that this shouldn't have been
sent to "bug-sipb". On the other hand, "bugs" won't be able to deal
with it either. If you want a hacky solution that works, try OLC.)
> in a business letter, i thought the left margin of the date
> should align with left margin of signature. however, latex's
> letter format does not do this. the date field is all the way to the
> right and the signature field is centered.
The fact that LaTeX doesn't do what you want it to do is unfortunate,
but it is unlikely it will get fixed by SIPB. There are several
reasons for this.
SIPB doesn't really have enough resources to support this type of
style file hacking. Maintaining tex, latex, xdvi and dvips takes up
most of our TeX-related resources these days...
Furthermore, this is a formatting style issue, and there are far too
many places where LaTeX macros just assume they know the correct
formatting and make anyone who disagrees go through some pain to get
it their way. In many of these places (and I would argue this is one
of them), it is hard to decide which type of formatting is really
"correct".
If you develop a modified version of the letter style (or a document
style option) to align the margins, we'd be happy to install it in the
newtex locker. At present, this is probably all we can do.
I wish I could be of more help...
--bert
