Often I have the need to type up a document which needs nothing fancy; just basic formatting that looks reasonable and won’t appear too strange to people who are used to Word. Something like: title, author, headings, body text that all fit nicely together.
(In particular, the last time I tried LaTeX’s default margins, they were kind of huge. I know there’s reasons for that, but I sure don’t care for them — I’d rather use a larger font to get lines of reasonable length, and I’d like to use fewer pages.)
I have a number of such documents knocking around, each with slightly different boilerplate that has accumulated over the past 10-15 years. It seems time to start fresh, rather than groveling through my old stuff and trying to choose which document to copy.
In other words, what's the modern minimal document destined for pdfLaTeX? Are there packages that I can include that will magically make things look up-to-date and good?
(I realize this question is a little vague, so any feedback on making it better would be welcome.)
.sty). Then you do\documentclass{basicdoc}or\usepackage{basicdoc}and you're off to the races. The contents will depend on what these documents contain. Mine wouldn't have math, e.g., but yours might; mine would have footnotes, but yours might not; will there be bibliographies, multiple languages? Etc., etc. – jon Jun 20 '12 at 4:49