lukeolson / illinois-letterhead

Replicating the Illinois letterhead in latex

What is this

This is an attempt to reproduce the Illinois letterhead in Latex using the new brand, the block-I.

The official [typogrophy] recommendation is the Montserrat font, used here and included in TexLive. The main text defaults to Montserrat, but the body can be easily changed.

How to use

Copy (or link) the illinois-letterhead.sty and .pdf logo files to your working directory. In addition, you will need sig.png or some other signature if you plan to use one. Then start with template.tex and modify.

The following commands are optional:

Command	Description
\fromdept{<text>}	Department name
\fromdeptaddress{<text>}	Department address
\fromtel{<text>}	Phone number (footer)
\fromemail{<text>}	Email address (footer)
\fromweb{<text>}	URL (footer)
\fromname{<text>}	From name (closing)
\closing{<text>}	Closing text (e.g. Sincerely,, closing)
\signaturefile{<filename>}	Signature file (closing)

How to use, writing many letters

Script startletter.sh is simple script that can create a directory for each letter. For example,

./startletter.sh some_topic_2024

will create

some_topic_2024
├── illinois-letterhead.sty
├── Illinois-Logo-Full-Color-CMYK.pdf
├── Illinois-Wordmark-Horizontal-Full-Color-CMYK.pdf
├── sig.png
└── some_topic_2024.tex

Each letter is then self-contained to a directory. Replace sig.png and/or modify the script.

What it looks like

full pdf

Details

You can see details by using the layout option: \usepackage[layout]{illinois-letterhead}. Setting this shows the measurements similar to here.

Other versions (not maintained)

• imark branch: the old I-mark style.
• blocki-basic branch: the non space-saving original version of this template in the block-I format.
• blocki-nonpackage branch: uses \input{} instead of \usepackage{}

illinois-letterhead's Issues

email and web hyperlinks backwards in template

In the template letter, replace the line lines

\providecommand\fromemail{\url{[email protected]}} \providecommand\fromweb{\href{http://netid.cs.illinois.edu}{netid.cs.illinois.edu}}

with the lines

\providecommand\fromemail{\href{mailto:[email protected]}{[email protected]}} \providecommand\fromweb{\url{http://netid.cs.illinois.edu}}

The \url macro uses its argument both as text and as a hyperlink target, and raw email addresses are not valid hyperlink targets.

This should be a package instead of a raw latex file

This really should be formatted as a latex package, so the user can write \usepackage{illinois-letterhead} in the preamble instead of \input{illinois}.

This could be as simple as renaming the file "illinois-letterhead.sty".

update to block-I

Update to new logo when available.
http://creativeservices.illinois.edu/brand/

high quality image

imark_1867_bold.pdf is b&w. imark.png is Illinois blue but low quality.