Document Classes ⇒ All the LaTeX classes

[Cham]

I was often using the RevTex4 class to make some small documents to be distributed to students, about physics laboratory protocols. Unfortunately, I discovered recently that this specific class contains some severe limitations and may even have bugs. So I need to find a replacement that has a similar general layout about title placements and style, margins, page number placement, etc.

The natural question to be asked is then : what are all the LaTeX classes available ?

I searched the internet, and of course found the usual classes like Beamer, Book, Article, etc. But I did not found yet a complete list of ALL the classes available, and would also like to have a visual description of each one, like this :

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/srid ... lasses.pdf

This PDF document is nice, but isn't complete, and is of very low resolution. You can't zoom in to clearly see the differences between classes.

So is it possible to create such a visual list of all classes available ? Is there a document somewhere that shows all the classes ?

[Johannes_B]

Good question, but hard to answer. LaTeX classes are simple text documents, just like your tex files. You know the standard classes (let's just say this is article, report and book). They are limited with respect to extra options, meaning it is quite easy but hard to customize.

Now entering: memoir and KOMA
memoir is a multipurpose class for books, reports and articles. KOMA provides alternative classes (scrartcl, scrreprt, and scrbook) to the generic standard classes. Customization is much easier, but much harder.

Based on those classes are most of all other classes for the same purpose, and there are at least a few hundred. All of them do the same (maybe slightly different) but have another visual appearance. By now, I (personally) think this is a design bug made 30 years ago. Of course, 30 years ago there was no internet and machines where slow. You where lucky to typeset a single page in a couple of minutes.

Please compare the following example, once with the block commented out, once in:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[
DIV=16,twocolumn%             <--- this one
]{scrartcl}
\KOMAoptions{headings=small}% <--- this one
\usepackage{blindtext}
\begin{document}
\blinddocument
\end{document}

As you can see, the visual appearance has changed completely, with the same class.