8

I would like a letter at the start of my report, but it would be a different document class.

Could I use the same .tex file, with \begin{document}\end{document}\begin{document}\end{document}?

doncherry
  • 54,637
MercurialMadnessMan
  • 773
  • 6
    TeX will stop the compilation process the first time it sees \end{document} (non verbatim). So, no you cannot use \begin{document}\end{document}\begin{document}\end{document}. – cjorssen Mar 09 '12 at 17:32

3 Answers3

16

I would write the letter as a different document, compile it into a PDF and include it in the report using \includepdf{<filename>} from the pdfpages package. This avoids the double documentclass, but only works with full pages. However, this seem what you want anyway.

MercurialMadnessMan
  • 773
Martin Scharrer
  • 262,582
13

Just for fun, you can have it all in "one file" (note that shell-escape must be active).

\documentclass{report}

\usepackage{filecontents,pdfpages}

\begin{filecontents*}{myletter.tex}
\documentclass{letter}
\begin{document}
This is my letter.
\end{document}
\end{filecontents*}

\immediate\write18{pdflatex myletter}

\begin{document}

\IfFileExists{myletter.pdf}{\includepdf{myletter.pdf}}{}

My report.

\end{document}
cjorssen
  • 10,032
  • 4
  • 36
  • 126
  • 1
    In this case you might want to load the filecontents package as well (before the environment of course) to ensure that the external file is outdated when you change the content changes. Otherwise an existing file will never be overwritten. – Martin Scharrer Mar 09 '12 at 17:43
  • Okay, will do. I'm using shareLaTeX for the collaboration on the report, which doesn't allow compilation options, so not sure if this approach will work... but I will try! – MercurialMadnessMan Mar 09 '12 at 17:47
  • @MartinScharrer Thanks Martin. This 'feature' of the filecontents environment has bothered me for a while. Updated answer. – cjorssen Mar 09 '12 at 18:50
  • 1
    @cjorssen -- This is a very neat solution. – yannisl Mar 09 '12 at 18:59
  • Wouldn't this rather be the job of a Makefile? – krlmlr Mar 09 '12 at 20:39
  • I'm using Windows and TeXstudio and therefore a makefile isn't really the way to got -- is there a way to pass commands from the first document to the second such as \newcommand{\EMAIL}{cccc@sss.com} ? – jlk Aug 23 '15 at 13:13
3

There are command-line tools that can combine several PDF files into one, such as pdftk:

pdftk a.pdf b.pdf output a_plus_b.pdf

Combine this with a Makefile or a similar mechanism to compile only what's necessary. latexmk can do a nice job here, too:

latexmk -pdf a
latexmk -pdf b

will run pdflatex, bibtex etc. on both a.tex and b.tex as often as necessary.

krlmlr
  • 12,530