4. Further Essential LATEX
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics eBooks · 1997
4.1 Document Classes and the Overall Structure The example on page 6 shows a full LATEX file, which begins with the command \documentclass{article} This command tells LATEX that the document is to have the article class. Other classes that are available include report, book, slides, and letter. The different classes vary in the range of optional arguments that are available and also in some of the predefined formatting commands. We concentrate in this section on information that applies to the article and report classes; Appendix D deals with the slides class. The article class is designed for relatively short documents, such as journal papers, while report is meant for longer works that are broken into chapters. As an alternative to the standard classes built into LATEX, you can use any available class that has been appropriately defined in a file with a cls extension. Suppose that the file is called myclass.cls. Then the opening command \documentclass{myclass} can be used. A description of how to set up a new class is beyond the scope of this book; see [3, 7] if you wish to know more. If you are preparing a long, specialized document, such as a thesis, then you may benefit from a customized document class. If you are fortunate, your institution will already have a class available, complete with documentation and sample files. Many cls files that have been written by other LATEXers are available over the Internet. It is possible to specify optional arguments to the \documentclass command inside square braces. For example, the default type size of 10 points can be enlarged to 11 points (10% bigger) by specifying \documentclass[11pt]{article} Replacing 11pt by 12pt would give a type size of 12 points (20% bigger than the default). Note that 11pt and 12pt are the only available variations on the default size of 10pt.