Environment thebibliography undefined when using letter

[hany.azzam]

Greetings,
I am using the letter document class, and I want to include some citations. From what I have gathered the letter document class doesn't allow having bibliography items in the letter body. If that's the case, is there a workaround?
Here is the code that I am trying to run:

Code: Select all  •  Open in writeLaTeX

\documentclass{letter}

\signature{}
\begin{document}
\begin{letter}{}

\begin{center}{}
\end{center} \vfill

\opening{Dear}
 
\closing{Sincerely yours,}
 
\encl{}                
\end{letter}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{bibdb}
\end{document}

I receive the following error:
Latex Error: Environment thebibliography undefined.

The purpose of using a letter class and citations is because I want to write a cover letter and I need to refer to some citations inside of the letter's body.

Thank you,
h.

[localghost]

This environment is simply not defined in the used class because it's very unusual to write a letter with references to a bibliography. But you could borrow the code from the article class. Open a shell (command prompt) to find out where this class file is located.

Code: Select all  •  Open in writeLaTeX

kpsewhich article.cls

The code for the thebibliography environment and all other necessary stuff can be found very easily.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten¹

[lwaldron]

It's not quite so simple, as there are a number of things that must be defined to get the bibliography to work. I got it working with the following code copied from article.cls into a file "letterbib.sty" then the command \usepackage{letterbib} in the preamble:

Code: Select all  •  Open in writeLaTeX

\setlength \labelsep {.5em}
\newcommand\newblock{\hskip
  .11em\@plus.33em\@minus.07em} \let\@openbib@code\@empty
\newcommand\refname{References}
\newcommand\section{\@startsection
  {section}{1}{\z@}%
  {-3.5ex \@plus -1ex \@minus -.2ex}%
  {2.3ex \@plus.2ex}%
  {\normalfont\Large\bfseries}}
\newenvironment{thebibliography}[1]
{\section*{\refname}%
  \@mkboth{\MakeUppercase\refname}{\MakeUppercase\refname}%
  \list{\@biblabel{\@arabic\c@enumiv}}%
  {\settowidth\labelwidth{\@biblabel{#1}}%
    \leftmargin\labelwidth \advance\leftmargin\labelsep \@openbib@code
    \usecounter{enumiv}%
    \let\p@enumiv\@empty \renewcommand\theenumiv{\@arabic\c@enumiv}}%
  \sloppy \clubpenalty4000 \@clubpenalty \clubpenalty
  \widowpenalty4000%
  \sfcode`\.\@m} {\def\@noitemerr {\@latex@warning{Empty
      `thebibliography' environment}}%
      \endlist}

[mikeg]

Hi lwaldron,

Just wanted to thank you for posting your solution to the problem. It came in very handy.

Best,

Mike

[lwaldron]

You're welcome Mike, it's nice to hear that posting it was worthwhile.
-Levi

[acfrery]

Thank you very much for the solution of an issue that has been bothering me for years!
Alejandro