Hope this is not a stupid question but I'm a newbie to LaTeX. I am using LaTeX to write my Humanities thesis and while I am concentrating on the content at the moment I am just using a template I found on-line to work with. I am the only one in the department using LaTeX so there are no guidelines/template in-house to use. There are certain elements I have to adhere to such as what headers and footers contain, but noting drastic.
My aim is, partly to help learn LaTeX, is to write up my own document for the finalised thesis. I have read some guides and it appears to me that the document class book is suited for a thesis as I can put frontmatter
mainmatter
and backmatter
. I then get the sense that memoir class is based on book class but has more packages by default.
I suppose what this boils down to is if I use the memoir class is it easier to customise the document?
PS: I use LaTeX on Ubuntu 14.04 with TeXstudio and compile with pdflatex
and biber
for my references.
memoir
user, so please take this with a grain of salt. thebook
class is sort of a "least common denominator". the segmentation is appropriate, and i'm pretty sure thatmemoir
is reasonably parallel. butmemoir
allows much more flexibility, and has much better (and more thorough) documentation. it was created by someone to whom books mean something for themselves, and to be proud of, not just as a means to get information out to users.memoir
was the outcome of a long project of Peter Wilson’s, rather than a development ofbook
class. his interim work consisted of a series of packages, whose contents were merged with something that was almost certainly influenced bybook
, but wasn’t in any real sense a development of it. (imo, anyway...)book
, but that it is intended to be used particularly for books, not for journal articles. it certainly has both a lot more capabilities, and much superior output thanbook
. (if i were starting a project from scratch, and weren't constrained to ams classes, i'd usememoir
. i've rarely seen such a well designed and documented tool. peter wilson has my full admiration for his accomplishment.)memoir
. I think you should give it a try.