rugk / ifg-letter-appeal

A LaTeX template for appeals to official notifications of agencies to (German) “Freedom of information” (FOI) requests, in German the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (IFG).

German translation

ifg-letter-appeal

A LaTeX template for appeals to official notifications of agencies to (German) “Freedom of information” (FOI) requests, in German the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (IFG). Created for and suggested to be used with FragDenStaat.

Currently only available in German.

Example

The included text is mostly intended as an example. Also, it includes some common arguments/boilerplate text you may re-use.

The PDF of this compiled template can also be downloaded.

Building

We recommend a current Tex distribution, e.g. TexLive 2020. The used font has a display bug in older versions. LuaLaTeX is also recommended (but other LaTeX compilers should work as well).

The file me-agency.lco.example in the folder sender must be renamed to me-agency.lco for the build process to work.

Structure

• sender/ contains the sender's data (i.e. your data) you want to include.
• receiver/ contains the contact data of the receiver (i.e. the agency).
• sender.lco contains general settings about how the sender is displayed.
• ifg-letter-appeal.tex is the main entry point. Use it to generate the letter.

Credits

The letter style is mostly made possible thanks to scrletter/scrlttr2, i.e. the LaTeX KOMA-Script classes.

Also thanks to the awesome Stackexchange Tex community. (Used questions/answers are usually linked as comments.)

Other helpful links

• How to calculate the time limit for appeals? (German) Also explains the formal requirements.
• CTAN page for scrletter with links to the documentation of KOMA-Script of (scrguide.pdf) in German and English.
• Other letter templates in other formats (German) in the OKFN/FragDenStaat forum.

Legal notice

This does not constitute legal advice. The texts used are only examples and should be checked for their application before each use.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

ifg-letter-appeal by rugk is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY).

ifg-letter-appeal's Issues

Remove mail merge feature

The template has initially been built to make mass mailings (mail merge) possible, but this is likely not very useful given you anyway have to write things separately.

Uncomment the next line if you use knitr and want to ignore its generated tikz f...

ifg-letter-appeal/.gitignore

Lines 150 to 155 in 8647e6b

	# TODO Uncomment the next line if you use knitr and want to ignore its generated tikz files
	# *.tikz
	*-tikzDictionary
	# listings
	*.lol

---

This issue was generated by todo based on a TODO comment in 8647e6b. It's been assigned to @rugk because they committed the code.

CI for building

Markdown support (with pandoc)

First of all, I really like your template, great work!

I personally like to write my letters in Markdown and use pandoc together with a template to compile them to beautiful, well-formatted PDFs. This is made possible by pandoc's template syntax, which parses data from a markdown file's YAML frontmatter and places it within the document.

As an example, setting the sender's name using pandoc and YAML works as follows:

1. Replace the sender's name with the sender.name variable in your LaTeX file:

\newcommand{\ownname}{$sender.name$}

2. Mention a sender.name entry in your markdown's YAML frontmatter:

---
sender:
  name: Vorname Nachname
---

...text...

An entire IFG letter written in Markdown may look like this:

---
sender:
  name: Vorname Nachname
  address:
  - ExampleStreet 42
  - 12345 Stadt
  email: [email protected]
  phone: "[phone]"
  url: http://test.de
receiver:
  - Informationstechnikzentrum Bund
  - Bernkasteler Straße 8
  - 53175 Bonn
date: 24. April 2021 # defaults to today
place: Stadt
location: Stadt
request:
  title: Informationsanfrage zu Beispieldaten
  number: 123456
  mail: [email protected]
  uploadToken: copytokenforuploadhere
  date: "01. Januar 2021"
  noticeDate: "01. Februar 2021"
  noticeRef: "123456#EXAMPLE#0042"
  docNr: "123456#EXAMPLE#0042#0004"
---

# Sachverhalt

...

# Begründung

...

I have not created a PR yet since I first wanted to ask whether this feature could be incorporated into the project.

Since every variable used needs to be referenced in the LaTeX template, the template gets much more complex and becomes less suitable for manual editing. An example of what this looks like can be found here.

Further limitations of this approach:

• Only a predefined set of values can be changed. If someone wants to change the structure of the document, they need to do so in the LaTeX template.
• If the resulting PDF files need to be reproducable, the LaTeX template used needs to be versioned in so far it is subject to change. Since these letters of appeal are meant to be submitted to Frag den Staat, "losing" and therefore having to reproduce a letter is unlikely.
• If the underlying template is updated and includes breaking changes, old Markdown files may not correctly compile or may not compile at all.

I personally think that writing a little markdown with some frontmatter on top is much more enjoyable and quicker than dealing with seperate LaTeX files for every appeal and the limitations above are fairly manageable.

Do you think it makes sense to incorporate such a feature into this project, or is it out of the project's scope?

Use biber/bibref for citations

Currently citations are text, we should use proper LaTeX citation packages for that instead.

Improve legal text style (Urteilsstil)

See https://forum.okfn.de/t/tatsachen-stil-beim-formulieren-von-schriftsaetzen-fuers-gericht/1472/4?u=rugk

At least the template text should use a proper style here.