Letterhead for academic cover letter

Question

I'm writing cover letters for academic job applications. Is there a way to use LaTeX to have my letter appear on UCLA letterhead? (Is this something people do when submitting cover letters in pdf form?)

Edit: I found a relevant discussion on academia.stackexchange about whether or not one should do this in the first place.

Of course this can be done, but I wouldn't recommend doing it. Letterheads should only be used for official letters from the organization, not for one applying to the organization. In this case this would be letter from you, not the organization. — Peter Grill, Oct 30 '14 at 05:26
@PeterGrill Thank you for your comment! I would prefer not to use letterhead if that is standard. I read this article which says that academic cover letters should be written using the letterhead of one's academic institution. But I don't know how common or uncommon it is to do that. — littleO, Oct 30 '14 at 05:36
If you are employed at UCLA then they may have a standard style for this and it may be appropriate, there will be house rules governing this. If you are student there, then it is probably inappropriate. — Andrew Swann, Oct 30 '14 at 07:52
Legally, official letterheads are for outgoing documents and internal communications. If you use the letterhead without being actually affiliated there it would mean that you are using that institution credentials. I would avoid doing that. — percusse, Oct 30 '14 at 08:31
Take a look at KOMAscript, with the help of scrlttr2, Markus Kohm has reproduced the official header of the Washington State University. I am sure you are able to tinker this scrlttr2 to suit your purpose. — Sveinung, Oct 30 '14 at 14:25
Whether to use letterhead is OFF TOPIC for this site, folks. Now, how to use it? Why not just measure the actual letterhead, and then use \vspace*{} to leave that amount of space at the top of the first page, so you can print directly on the letterhead paper? — musarithmia, Sep 07 '15 at 20:33
Off-topic or not, there is confusion here between using-letterhead-of-the-place-applied-to and using-letterhead-of-current-institution. The first is definitely bad, but I understood the OP to be asking about the second. It seems more common to do this in the US than the UK, but maybe that's just my impression, but it might also depend where you are. But, anyway, off-topic. — cfr, Oct 15 '15 at 19:51

Mensch · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-09T23:41:58.097

Your question divides in two parts, on related to LaTeX, one to law:

1 How can I create an letterhead with LaTeX?

2 Am I allowed to do so?

To Question 2: If you are a member of a university (for example a professor) and have to write notes, letters in the name of the university then you should use the official letterhead. That makes your note or letter to an official document announcing an offical statement of the university or part of it. And has the advantage that it reproduces the corporate identity ...

An academic job applications is never an statement of the university, it is a personal thing for you. So you never should use a letterhead of your university (and as far as I know you are not allowed to). It is not the university which wants a new job, it's you. In your CV the reader will see that your last activity has been on the university.

See the comments of the other users: At last they tell you to avoid this!

Conclusion: No (as already mentioned in the linked discussion)!

To Question 1: A "good" university will provide templates for letters and other documents and if they knew and use LaTeX, they will have templates for LaTeX too. So first ask for the official template.

If they have no LaTeX template LaTeX gives you several possibilities to create a letter, for example the class letter or scrlttr2 (KOMA-Script). At last it depends on the corporate identity how the letterhead has to look.

One possibility is mentioned by the comment of Sveinung: http://www.komascript.de/node/1599 I think this is a very good point to start. I'm using KOMA-Script too :-)

The other possibility is to use letter, but I have no example for that.

Conclusion: It depends on the corporate identity of the university how the letterhead has to look. Usually the university will provide a template. If not you can make it with LaTeX by your own, but it will be not so easy to keep the corporate identity.

Because you gave no example I can't say more.

This is a very Euro-centric view. For Q1, In the North American academic world, cover letters are expected to be on university letterhead if the person applying for the job has an actual position (lecturer/professor of any rank, post-doc) at the institution. This typically doesn't apply to graduate students, whose positions are considered to be part of funding their studies. As for Q2, you'd be surprised at how many "good" universities don't provide such templates. In the US at least its quite common for departments and/or individuals to end up making their own. — Alan Munn, Sep 07 '15 at 15:14

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 15 '15 at 19:27

Many universities (at least in the US) have specific guidelines regarding appropriate usage of graphics, logos, etc. These can usually be found on a university website (search for "graphic identity" or "visual identity"), where official logos may also be available for download. This is the case at my institution, so I include the letterhead using fancyhdr.

Note that the letterhead example-image may not need to be resized, as it should already be available with the correct dimensions. I also use a vectorized version of my signature in the closing, which I include here as example-image-a.

Also note that \thispagestyle{fancy} must come after \opening{} in order for the header/footer to appear on the first page.

\documentclass[11pt]{letter}
\usepackage[paper=letterpaper,tmargin=1in,bmargin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{marvosym} % for some symbols
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy} % letter will ignore this on 1st page
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
\chead{\includegraphics[width=\linewidth,height=2cm]{example-image}}
\renewcommand{\footrulewidth}{1pt}
\cfoot{%
   \fontsize{10}{12}\selectfont
   \Letter~ Official address, which can be quite long\\
   \Email~ \texttt{email@domain.edu}
   \qquad
   \Telefon~ \texttt{+1 (234) 555-1212}
}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}

\begin{letter}{%
Recipient address
}

\opening{To whom it may concern:}
\thispagestyle{fancy}
%% this must come after opening to get header on first page

\lipsum[1-2]

\medskip
\closing{Closing,

\smallskip
\includegraphics[height=10mm]{example-image-a} %signature

\smallskip
Personal details
}
\end{letter}
\end{document}

Letterhead for academic cover letter

2 Answers2