What are the actual differences between the two? I am new to LaTeX and I need to create a custom "look & feel" -- should I be looking into making a class or a style?
2 Answers
To answer your question directly: imho, you should start by seeing if you can tweak one of the ready-made documentclass
, and if you really can't get it to look the way you want (which is really quite unlikely), then consider making your own (but I don't think anyone would recommend this until you've experimented extensively with the choices described below).
Some basic documentclass
examples:
article
is one of the most simple, and will allow the highest section level assection
report
andbook
are the next ones up fromarticle
and will make the highest section level aschapter
In each of these classes, you will likely use packages to help you tweak the appearance such as
geometry
to get your page dimensions setupfancyhdr
to get your headers and footersenumitem
to customize your enumerationstitlesec
to customize your section/chapter headings
The tufte-book
class has some particularly aesthetically pleasing settings by default.
Once you are familiar with these classes, you can move on to some of the more intricate classes such as memoir
, koma-script
, etc. I describe these as intricate because some of the packages that work with the 'basic' classes do not work with these (they have their own way of doing the same thing).
Once you've produced a few simple documents and you want to put some 'bling' into them, you could start by reading the following post, and the answers within:
In modern LaTeX a class is one of the major formats for documents. It is invoked using \documentclass
. Style files sit on top of these, and are invoked using \usepackage
. If you absolutely have to make something, then make an example document using a standard class first, then use some newpackages
, newcommands
and other tweaks to get it looking how you like, and then bundle those bits of your preamble into a style file. Do not start making a style file straight away. This will only lead to frustration.
article
, orbook
.