Document styles

We have explained the concept of a document style during our discussion of the virtues of TEX and the discussion of . It remains to name a few, and indicate where they would be used. One always has to choose a document style when preparing a document with LATEX.

The basic document styles in LATEX are letter, article, report, and book. Many more are available, but these few cover the majority of straightforward applications. This is because styles are not rigid—you can impose your own parameter choices if you want. So one chooses the style that most closely approximates the document you have in mind, and performs some minor tweaks here and there. The article style is used for documents that are to have the appearance of a journal or magazine article. The report style is usually used for larger documents than the article style. These styles really only differ in their choice of default page size, font, placement of title and author, sectional units, etc. and on how they format certain LATEX constructs. You use the same LATEX commands in each. Since the examples here will be small, we will choose to use the article document style.

There are a number of possible options with each document style. The syntax for choosing a document style follows. Don't worry if this leaves you with no idea of how to choose a document style, for we will soon be seeing some examples. Also, remember that an argument in square brackets is optional, and can omitted altogether (including the brackets).

\documentstyle [options]{style}

where style is the main document style (eg report) and the optional argument options is a list of document style options chosen from the following list:
11pt chooses 11-point as the default font size for the document, instead of the default 10-point.
12pt chooses 12-point as the default font size.
twoside formats output as left and right pages, as in a book.
twocolumn produces two-column magazine like output.
titlepage applies to the article style only, causing the title and abstract to appear on a page each.

In fact there are many, many more document style options but we won't mention any more here.