Most useful additions in KOMA-Script?

Question

(Background: I'm a beginner who will mostly use LaTeX for university articles and reports, but no math. Also, as I reside in Canada, the German typography conventions, which I understand KOMA-Script supports better than LaTeX, are less relevant).

I've read that the KOMA-Script package has a lot of improvements for the default document classes. Yet the manual's length, about 250 pages, is somewhat daunting. I plan to read the chapters I'm interested in anyway but it'd be useful to have some pointers about low hanging fruits. I searched the site and other answers say KOMA-Script adds improvements but do not delve into details.

I'll ask this as a community wiki topic and, since the audience of this site is international, feel free to mention German typography if KOMA-Script is better there.

Answer 1

Unlike memoir, the KOMA-Script-classes do not add the functionality of dozens of packages to the LaTeX core - but the KOMA-additions are useful and extremely easy to handle. Roughly in order of the documentation:

• Customizable type area with default values that also (contrary to the standard classes) work well for letter- and A4-paper,
• Support for arbitrarily chosen font sizes (e.g. 10.5pt),
• Ability to change font size mid-document,
• Customization of the font attributes of many document elements,
• Enhanced \maketitle features (e.g. \subtitle),
• \addpart, \addchap, and \addsec commands producing unnumbered parts, chapters, and sections that are nevertheless included in the table of contents,
• Options to include the bibliography, the index etc. in the table of contents,
• parskip option that is more powerful than the package of the same name,
• Configurable footnotes (including some features of the footmisc package),
• Option open=left to always start chapters on left pages,
• Consistent formatting of every "listofsomething" (e.g. "chapter gaps" in the "List of Listings"),
• Lots of little things.

Answer 2

KOMA-Script brings even more than extended classes: it offers packages to allow other classes to benefit from its features.

Here are some of them:

• typearea provides automatic calculation of layout dimensions according to classical typography,

• scrlayer-scrpage (scrpage2 is superseded) is a feature-rich replacement for fancyhdr,

• scrextend brings various KOMA-features together with non-KOMA classes,

• scrlfile helps managing package dependencies,

• tocbasic manages table of contents and lists of tables and figures and so on,

• tocstyle helps with formatting table of contents and lists of floats.

Answer 3

In addition to what has already been mentioned the KOMA bundle provides the letter class scrlttr2 which is a huge improvement over the standard letter class. scrlttr2 is both easy to configure and has a lot of features including the option of generating letters from address lists.