About life, the universe and everything

Sometimes standards are stupid. For example when it comes to writing official letters, every country has it’s own rules of how to write such letter. In Belgium they are called the BIN standards. (dutch only)

In the tetex distribution there’s a package call NTG that contains classes for standard letters, for the Netherlands. Luckily for us, these standards don’t differ very much. A few minor changed were enough to have a template for Belgian letters. I made these adjustments, and renamed the class to briefbe. You can download it and use it if you want to here.

TeX is wonderful standard that is specially designed for making up text documents. LaTeX is a macro extension package for the TeX typesetting system. The greatest advantage of using LaTeX instead of a word processor is that the author doesn’t have to bother about how the text will look. The author defines the structure, LaTeX does the layout.

People with a visual feedback addiction will have serious troubles using this system, because when you are actually typing the text you don’t see what it’s going to look like.