Letters

Four kinds, told apart by their shape rather than their name.

Kind	What it is
Cover letter	One page, addressed, about one posting.
Motivation letter	Longer and sectioned: your story and your reasons, usually with no addressee block. The norm for academic posts, EU institutions, NGOs and apprenticeships, and across much of Europe.
Speculative letter	Unsolicited, with no posting behind it. Pairs with a thin listing.
Follow-up note	Short, after an interview, and worth keeping because you will want the wording again.

Choose the kind when you make the letter and it starts from that kind's shape — a motivation letter opens with its sections in place, a follow-up note with two lines and a sign-off — and from the theme that suits it. Change either afterwards; nothing is locked. The letters page filters by kind, and a rendered motivation letter is filed as a motivation letter rather than a cover letter, so Sent documents says what it was.

Documents → Letters

Write one good letter and let placeholders do the repetitive part.

Placeholders

Six, and only six:

Placeholder	Filled with
{{ company }}	The company you are applying to
{{ role }}	The job title
{{ location }}	Where the role is based
{{ contact }}	The person you are writing to, if the application names one
{{ name }}	Your own name
{{ date }}	Today's date

Spacing inside the braces does not matter: {{company}} and {{ company }} are the same.

The first four come from the application the letter is being sent with, so the letter's page has a picker. Choose an application under Read it as they will and press Read it below: the preview under the letter's text is redrawn with everything filled in. Without one you are reading the version nobody sends. Open on its own gives the same document in a tab of its own.

A placeholder with nothing behind it is marked in the preview, as [ location ] rather than as a blank. A posting with no location, or an account with no name on it, would otherwise leave a gap in the finished letter that you would find only after it had gone. The marker is for reading: what gets frozen is the letter, gap and all.

A misspelt placeholder is left visible rather than silently blanked, so {{ compnay }} appears as-is in the draft. That is deliberate: quietly deleting a word would be worse than showing you the typo.

Before a letter is frozen

Record what you sent shows you the filled letter before freezing it, but only where something in it is empty: it names what will go out blank, shows the text with the gaps marked, and the button becomes Freeze it anyway. Where nothing is missing there is no extra step, because one everybody has to press through is read once and clicked past for ever after.

Why only six

A cover letter is text you wrote, and it usually contains fragments pasted from a job advert. Postulo substitutes placeholders with a simple pattern match over that fixed list of names — it does not run your letter through a template engine. A general-purpose expression language inside a document that carries employer-supplied text would be a liability rather than a feature.

If you paste something containing template syntax, it comes out as exactly the text you pasted.

Templates

Letters marked reusable template are offered when you record what you sent with an application. Untick it for a one-off letter written for a single employer.

Language

A letter has a language, and the PDF says so. It matters more than it sounds: the file you send is one a recruiter may open with a screen reader, and a Portuguese letter declaring itself English is read aloud with English letter-to-sound rules. The renderer hyphenates and justifies by the same declaration.

Leave it blank and the letter follows the language you read Postulo in, which is the right guess far more often than English is. Set it when you write to an employer in a language that is not your own. CVs have the same field, and behave the same way.

The list and the letter's own page show which language it is, as a flag beside its kind, or the language's own name where no flag stands for it.

Themes

The same two as CVs — Plain and Classic — laid out as a letter: your contact block, the recipient, the date, a subject line, then the body. A plugin may add others, and the menu here lists exactly the ones that can set a letter — which is not always the same list the CV form shows. See Themes.