Document Styles and Style Options
There are four standard document styles available in LATEX:
- article
- intended for short documents and articles for publication.
Articles do not have chapters, and when
\maketitle
is used to generate
a title (see Section
) it appears at the top of the first page
rather than on a page of its own.
- report
- intended for longer technical documents.
It is similar to
article, except that it contains chapters and the title appears on a page
of its own.
- book
- intended as a basis for book publication. Page layout is
adjusted assuming that the output will eventually be used to print on
both sides of the paper.
- letter
- intended for producing personal letters. This style
will allow you to produce all the elements of a well laid out letter:
addresses, date, signature, etc.
These standard styles can be modified by a number of style options.
They appear in square brackets after the \documentstyle
command.
Only one style can ever be used but you can have more than one style option,
in which case their names should be separated by commas. The standard style
options are:
- 11pt
- prints the document using eleven-point type for the running
text
rather that the ten-point type normally used. Eleven-point type is about
ten percent larger than ten-point.
- 12pt
- prints the document using twelve-point type for the running
text
rather than the ten-point type normally used. Twelve-point type is about
twenty percent larger than ten-point.
- twoside
- causes documents in the article or report styles to be
formatted for printing on both sides of the paper. This is the default for the
book style.
- twocolumn
- produces two column on each page.
- titlepage
- causes the
\maketitle
command to generate a
title on a separate page for documents in the article style.
A separate page is always used in both the report and book styles.
There is one further option which, while not standard to LATEX, is very
useful in all European countries. The a4 option causes the output in all
of the standard styles to be adjusted to fit correctly on A4 paper. LATEX
was designed in America where the standard paper is shorter and slightly wider
than A4; without this option you will find that your output looks a little
strange.