How to develop your own document class | our experience
Niall Manseld · 2008
We recently started re-using LATEX for large documents | professional computing books | and had to convert an old (1987) L A TEX 2.09 custom class to work with LATEX 2. We rst tried converting it to a stand-alone .cls le, which the documentation seemed to suggest is the thing to do, but we failed miserably. We then tried the alternative approach of writing an \add-on .sty le for the standard book.cls. This was straightforward, and much easier than expected. The resulting style is much shorter, and we can use most standard packages to add extra features with no eort. This paper describes our experience and the lessons and techniques we learned, which we hope will encourage more people to write their own styles or classes.