Cover Letters for Publications in LaTeX

I admit it. Although I compose most of my journal publications in LaTeX, I use Microsoft Word for writing the cover letters. The university's letterhead is provided in Word, and setting up and compiling a LaTeX document for a single text page is not worth the trouble.

However, a cover letter I was writing today was an exception. The corresponding paper is a major revision of a submission; about half of the text is new or updated material. Describing these changes in the cover letter proved challenging, because I kept referring to sections, tables, figures, and equations that I was moving around. Using the symbolic labels I had defined in the document would really help, allowing me to write things like:

Table \ref{tab:id} has been expanded to include the six largest systems,
while the values for all 32 systems now appear in the new Figure
\ref{fig:unused}.

Using the labels of one document in another proved quite easy. I first filtered with a shell command only the references I was interested in (the newlfm letter style I used was choking on the table of contents commands).

egrep "newlabel|bibcite" paper.aux >labels.aux

\input{labels.aux}

I expected to spend a lot of time composing our letterhead in LaTeX, but I adopted a much simpler solution. I converted the Word document to PDF, cropped the PDF page to the size of the letterhead, and included the PDF file as a graphic.

\newsavebox{\Caueb}
\sbox{\Caueb}{\parbox[t]{6 in}{%
\includegraphics[ext=.pdf]{/dds/aueb/dds-en-head}}}
\makelth{AUEB}{\Cheader{\usebox{\Caueb}}}
\lthAUEB

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