Latex can create beautiful documents. Well apart from letters. The standard Latex letter class is not popular. KOMAscript comes to the rescue. KOMA has created new classes for everything, but most important is its letter class "scrlttr2".

The only problem with it, and it is a bit of a FAQ, is that you can't get the date to align left. This is because KOMA puts the date in something called a 'business line' that contains all sorts of other stuff. To zap this business line and to get the date to flush hard left, I created a 'lco' file (letter class options file), that contains the following:

\@setplength{refvpos}{74mm}
\renewcommand*{\@datefield}{\vskip\useplength{refvpos}%
\hbox{\usekomavar{date}}%
\vskip 2\baselineskip%
}%

It sure ain't beautiful, but it works. If anyone has a better way of doing it, it would be great to hear it.

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