(1) university letterhead supplied as a msword format template document. I don't have msword
(2) I do have pages, so I open it up in that. can't edit the name/address fields in the letterhead
(3) try to recreate format of letterhead in pages but what if I get margins/position wrong, ugh
(4) ah, I'll use google docs instead! which will import msword files
(5) seems to work, can edit stuff
(6) export as PDF
(7) why is it blurry like that
(8) seven million threads like this https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/docs/2SfSONB1ao4;context-place=topicsearchin/docs/authorid$3AAPn2wQc8KGFzN_tV6r2q9YjuD6gfY-8MW4lCC01CIEipli005KBYIWZdGJ_W2CEkhHYRKg5Y0KZw%7Csort:date%7Cspell:false
in conclusion, word processing was a bad idea
@aparrish What might be better?
Why hasn't it succeeded?
I'm strongly partial to Markdown => LaTeX, though other simplified markup languages also work.
@aparrish “in conclusion, *proprietary* word processing was a bad idea”
fixed it for u. 
Unfortunately, the most ludicrous solution to your problem that I can think of on short notice involves extracting the letterhead to an image and then inserting it into the background of the PostScript document whose troff source has left space for it.
I'm sure that if you give me a few hours, I can also work in an IBM 370 emulated on a Raspberry Pi and a Lego Mindstorms robot.