What are the available “documentclass” types and their uses?

Question

Some of the available classes of documents in LaTeX are well known and widely used, such as the article and beamer classes, while others are not so well known, such as the standalone class.

I found this figure

which lists the main classes and is a good starting point, but the description is too short and still leaves one wondering when it would be more suitable to choose one class over the other and what the characteristics of each class is. Furthermore, the list is not exhaustive I think, given that I know at least one more document class that is not there (the standalone class, as I mentioned).

So my question is: what are the available classes of documents in LaTeX, and could you provide a brief description of the class and the situations where it would be recommended?

Please give only one class per answer.

Answer 1

The classes in the KOMA-Script bundle* (scrbook, scrreprt, scrartcl, scrlttr2) provide replacements of standard classes (book, report, article and letter respectively). They offer lots of configuration options to accommodate different layouts without using ugly hacks. Generally I think they are nearer to European (and in particular German) typography conventions than the standard classes are.

* see also the german homepage of KOMA-Script.

Answer 2

There's a category in the TeX Catalogue: Alternative Document Classes.

Answer 3

The memoir class is based on the book class. It implements a lot of design facilities that with other classes usually need loading additional packages. The result is a feature-rich, customizable and powerful class, especially useful for designing books.

memoir offers an extensive manual with more than 500 pages containing also examples for the design of a book and of a thesis.

Answer 4

I've grown to love standalone recently, particularly for tikz-graphics. Never again I will have to run pdfcrop on the output from my pdflatex run, because that is what the standalone class does.

Answer 5

The beamer class is designed for creating presentations (although it can be used for academic posters in conjunction with the beamerposter class). It provides a wide range of graphical functions for making 'good looking' presentations. The specialist functions in beamer include modifications to standard macros (such as the lists itemize and enumerate) so that they can be revealed partwise. The class is designed to be able to also produce article-style material by including the appropriate. The documentation also provides advice on what makes a good presentation.

Answer 6

Sorry about violating your "one class per answer" request, but I feel that these three should be included in the same post: amsart, amsbook, and amsproc. They come from the ams-LaTeX collection prepared by the American Mathematical Society and are the standard document classes to use for preparing documents for publication by the AMS. As their names suggest, they are modified versions of the article, book, and proc classes to adhere to the AMS's house style, and also incorporate the features of the package amsthm and load supplementary mathematics packages amsmath and amsfonts. For more detail one should refer to the website for the collection.

Answer 7

I think the base classes probably deserve a single answer. (minimal, letter and slides are different enough to need their own answers.)

The article class is, as the name suggests, intended for writing articles. This means relatively short documents which do not contain chapters or parts, only sections, subsections, etc. As one of the base classes, the formatting is pretty basic. However, as the article class does provide the basic function most people expect from LaTeX it is often used with modifications for longer documents.

The report class is intended for longer documents which will have chapters, while book is intended for very large documents. The standard settings for report and book are slightly different from article. For example, the default for article is to put the \maketitle information at the top of the first page, whereas report and book use separate title pages. book includes pre-defined shortcuts for the \frontmatter (unnumbered chapters with roman page numbers), \mainmatter (numbered chapters and arabic page numbers) and \backmatter.

All of the base classes have very basic formatting. Some of this can be questioned, but the LaTeX Project have made it clear that with so much use of these classes, the decisions are 'fixed'. As a result, modifying the base classes is an approach many people use for there own documents.

Answer 8

Okay, one class per answer, so I'll make a start with something basic.

The minimal class is the absolute minimum you load and actually have LaTeX work. It's only intended for testing purposes, as it doesn't define many things you almost always expect (things like titling and sectioning commands). You would not usually use the minimal class yourself as it is so basic that there will not really be suitable for real work.

Answer 9

moderncv is a class for typesetting modern curriculums vitae. If offers both a classic and a casual style. It is fairly customizable allowing the definition of your own style regarding colors and fonts.

More classes useful for writing a CV can be found in the CV category of the TeX Catalogue.

Answer 10

The exam document class:

Provides a class exam, which eases production of exams, even by a LaTeX novice. Simple commands are provided to:

• create questions, parts of questions, subparts of parts, and subsubparts of subparts, all with optional point values;
• create a grading table, indexed either by question number (listing each question and the total possible points for that question) or by page number (listing each page with points and the total possible points for that page);
• create headers and footers that are each specified in three parts: one part to be left justified, one part to be centered, and one part to be right justified, in the manner of fancyhdr

Headers and/or footers can be different on the first page of the exam, can be different on the last page of the exam, and can vary depending on whether the page number is odd or even, or on whether the current page continues a question from a previous page, or on whether the last question on the current page continues onto the following page.

Multiple line headers and/or footers are allowed, and it's easy to increase the part of the page devoted to headers and/or footers to allow for this.

A quick example:

\documentclass{exam}
\begin{document}
\begin{questions}
\question[10]
Why is there air?
\question
What if there were no air?
\begin{parts}
\part[5]
Describe the effect on the balloon industry.
\part[5]
Describe the effect on the aircraft industry.
\end{parts}
\question[20]
\begin{parts}
\part
Define the universe. Give three examples.
\part
If the universe were to end, how would you know?
\end{parts}
\end{questions}
\end{document}

Answer 11

REVTeX is a class designed for the American Physical Society (APS). It can produce output which is ready for production printing for a range of APS journals, depending on class options. The class provides a wide range of specialist functions needed by the journals, for example modifying how the \author macro works to improve the meta-data control. The REVTeX documentation includes a wide range of advice not only on the class itself but also on wider LaTeX use.

Answer 12

There are also many classes made specifically for formatting Masters and PhD theses. This is especially true in the U.S., where formatting requirements are often highly specified by particular universities and usually by people who have absolutely no sense about nice looking formatting. Some of these classes are available on CTAN (search for your university or just 'thesis') but many are unfortunately only circulated locally within a university. Classes that are available on CTAN and actively maintained are likley to be your best choice, if they are available.

If your university does not have a class available, and you are thinking of creating one, I would recommend basing it on one of the 'augmented' classes such as memoir or scrbook rather than one of the basic classes since, as other answers note, both of these classes provide non-hacky ways of implementing all sorts of formatting requirements, and both are extensively documented.

Answer 13

The leaflet document class:

A document class to create small hand-outs (flyers) that fit on a single sheet of paper which is then folded twice. Pages are rearranged by LaTeX so that they print correctly on a single sheet — no external script is necessary.

See this example output:

Answer 14

powerdot is a good alternative to the beamer class. Presentations can be developed easily. It provides many styles and allows creating your own style. powerdot offers automatic overlays, notes and a handout mode, further it supports LyX.

It's intended to replace the older classes prosper and HA-prosper.

powerdot requires PSTricks. So, it may be a good choice when you're using PSTricks in a presentation, but it cannot benefit from pdfTeX features.

Answer 15

The extsizes package provides the classes extarticle, extreport, extbook, extletter and extproc. They can be used instead of a corresponding base class and allow choosing a base font of a size between 8pt and 20pt.

When you're in need of a base font size that standard classes don't provide, these classes adjust commands like \tiny, \Huge etc. fitting to your desired base font size, further they adjust page dimensions, list and float dimensions accordingly.

Note that the KOMA-Script classes allow any font size specified in any TeX measurement unit so they might be considered as well when specific font sizes are needed.

Answer 16

The apa6 document class:

It provides a full set of facilities in three different output modes (journal-like appearance, double-spaced manuscript, LaTeX-like document), in contrast to the earlier apa6e, which only formats double-spaced manuscripts in APA style. The class can mask author identity for copies for use in masked peer review.

Citations are provided using the apacite bundle; the class requires that package if citations are to be typeset.

Answer 17

slides is the basic class for presentations. It predated presenting using projectors, and shares with the other base classes the somewhat questionable layout choices. Other options such as powerdot or beamer are very much better choices than slides.

Answer 18

The tufte-la­tex package pro­vide two classes: tufte-handout and tufte-book in­spired, re­spec­tively, by hand­outs and books cre­ated by the work of Ed­ward Tufte.

Tufte’s style is known for its extensive use of sidenotes, tight integration of graphics with text, and well-set typography.

\documentclass{tufte-handout} 
\author{by Fran}
\title{A Minimal Working Example}
\usepackage{lipsum,blindtext}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx} % Demo option for MWE without image
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\begin{marginfigure}
\includegraphics[width=.9\textwidth]{Scrooge}
\caption{\blindtext}
\end{marginfigure}
\blindtext
\end{document}

Answer 19

The hitec document class de­signed for use for doc­u­men­ta­tion of high-tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies. It is a hack on the standard article class, but it looks very different. In fact, one of the design aims was to escape the academic look of the well-known LaTeX document classes.

\documentclass{hitec}
\author{by Fran}
\title{A Minimal Working Example}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\blinddocument
\end{document}