Letters in LaTeX

Once upon a time I did a great deal of work with $\TeX{}$ and $\LaTeX{}$. I implemented many elements that were not broadly supported at the time: changebars, backdrop images, special page construction processing, letter spacing, color, and so on. After finding a but I wrote up a proposed fix and mailed a letter to Donald Knuth, who responded, returning my letter with notes indicating that there was a better way to fix the problem.

Shortly thereafter he called me to ask what led me to the discovery. It was letterspacing, “a dirty word around here” he said. My work moved into a different realm, and so I didn’t keep up, but as I recall it the next release of $\TeX$ had numerous bugs. I don’t know whether the fix to mine contributed to the new crop.

I receive a check for my efforts, and another one later for finding a typo in the $\TeX\hbox{Book}$. Sadly they long ago faded into an unreadable state.

But today I needed only to create a $\LaTeX{}$ style file for letterhead. It started very slowly, but then suddenly it seemed familiar again. And now I have an easy and even scriptable way to produce decently-formatted letters. The tools are venerable, not obsolete.