Page Layout ⇒ HUGE margins around my letter

[DeShark]

Hello all. I'm trying to write a simple covering letter to apply for a job and I want to do it in LaTeX (I've had plenty of positive experience with LaTeX while writing documents and articles).

This is the code I'm using:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[letterpaper, 10pt]{letter}
\usepackage{geometry}

\frenchspacing

\address{
75 Road Street,\\
Town,\\
PO57 C0D3\\
Tel: 01888 888888\\
Email: ddd@sss.com}

\date{\today}

\signature{De Shark}

\begin{document}

\begin{letter}{}

\opening{Dear Sir/Madam,}

I wish to apply for the position of xxx at xxx.

\closing{Kind Regards,}

\end{letter}

\end{document}

The problem with this is the huge amount of white space around the body of text. I've searched the internet, but no-one else seems to really mind. I know I could probably just reduce the margins (\topmargin -10cm), but this seems like a hacky way of doing it. I'm after a more permanent fix. I learnt in my searches that LaTeX intentionally puts lots of white space for publishing purposes, but as I expect my covering letter to be read on-screen, I don't want this white space. Is there a way of cropping the page or setting up the margins a bit more tidily?

I'm using pdflatex under ubuntu 10.04 btw.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi DeShark,

welcome to the board!

I prefer the class scrlttr2 for this purpose. In this Wikibook there's an example with output. The scrlttr2 class can be finely customized. It's extensively documented in the KOMA-Script manual.

Stefan