Setting placement of a table in inches

Question

I am trying to place a table in my Latex document and margin it down and left and right. I can use the page margins \voffset and \hoffset but as you can see by my code below I am using a wallpaper image, so that messes the image up.

Is there a way to set horizontal and vertical placement of a table using actual in x and y placements?

Here is my current code:

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{letter}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\pagestyle{empty}
\hoffset = -0.23in
\voffset = 0.48in
\oddsidemargin = 0pt
\topmargin = 0pt
\headheight = 0pt
\headsep = 0pt
\marginparsep = 0pt
\marginparwidth = 0pt
\footskip = 0pt
\usepackage[paperwidth=6in,paperheight=2.75in]{geometry}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{wallpaper}
\CenterWallPaper{1}{check53.png}
\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{ p{4in} l }
\textbf{date} & \textbf{amount} \\ 
\multicolumn{2}{ l }{\rule{0pt}{0.15in}\textbf{to}} \\
\multicolumn{2}{ l }{\rule{-0.12in}{0.18in}\textbf{letters}} \\
\end{tabular} 

\end{document}

I want to set both h and v offset to 0 and position the table instead of the document.

Answer 1

I wouldn't use the letter class, but prefer article. The best approach, in my opinion, is to let all the job to geometry:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage[paperwidth=6in,paperheight=2.75in,margin=0pt]{geometry}

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{wallpaper}
\CenterWallPaper{1}{check53.png}

\pagestyle{empty}

\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{ @{} p{4in} l @{} }
\textbf{date} & \textbf{amount} \\ 
\multicolumn{2}{ l }{\rule{0pt}{0.15in}\textbf{to}} \\
\multicolumn{2}{ l }{\rule{-0.12in}{0.18in}\textbf{letters}} \\
\end{tabular} 

\end{document}

I've introduced also a couple of things more which may require to recompute the shifts, but put the document in a more predictable state (the text starts exactly from the left margin).