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Topos Uranos
English

Document classes and page layout

Summary

This lesson teaches how to choose the general form of a document and that of its page. It compares the three standard classes, article, report and book, by what each one offers (chapters, title page, even and odd pages, abstract) and deduces from this which one suits each academic genre; it presents the KOMA-Script classes as the alternative the course recommends for European typography; it goes through the class options that set the paper, the type size, one-sided or two-sided printing, the title page and draft mode; it explains why the classes leave wide margins and how to change them with the geometry package without spoiling the length of the line; and it ends with page styles, headers and footers.

Learning objectives

  1. Choose between article, report and book, or their KOMA-Script equivalents, according to the genre of the document and the way it will be printed, justifying the choice by what each class offers.
  2. Declare the class options that set the paper, the type size, one-sided or two-sided printing, the title page, the page on which chapters begin and draft mode, and predict their effect.
  3. Explain the relation between margins, line length and legibility, and set with geometry margins that comply with a regulation without making the line excessively long.
  4. Predict which page style each page of a document will have, including those the class decides on its own, and change it with \pagestyle and \thispagestyle.
  5. Build custom headers and footers with fancyhdr or with scrlayer-scrpage.

The class decides the general form

The first line of every source declares the document class, as seen in the lesson on the anatomy of a document. The class is no mere ornament: it decides which divisions exist, what \maketitle does, whether there is an environment for the abstract, how the margins are distributed and whether even pages are distinguished from odd ones. If this is so, choosing the class is the first decision about form, and it is best taken knowing what each one brings.

LaTeX comes with three standard classes for academic texts. Their differences, checked against the current version of each, are these.

  • article has no chapters: its largest division is \section. The title is typeset on the same page as the text, the abstract has its own abstract environment, and the document is printed one-sided.
  • report adds \chapter. The title takes a page of its own, so does the abstract, and printing is one-sided; each chapter begins on a new page, whether even or odd.
  • book has chapters and a title page, but is printed two-sided: the margins of even and odd pages alternate, and each chapter begins on an odd page, the right-hand page of the open book, even if a blank page must be left for that purpose. It has no abstract environment, because a book carries no abstract.
ExampleAn article with its abstract

In article, the title, the abstract and the text share the first page. With babel set to English, the abstract environment is headed “Abstract”.

LaTeX code
\documentclass{article}\usepackage{fontspec}\usepackage[english]{babel}\title{Day Length at Three Latitudes}\author{Alex Morgan}\date{}\begin{document}\maketitle\begin{abstract}The hours of daylight over a year are compared in threecities, and the difference is explained by latitude.\end{abstract}\section{Statement of the Problem}The length of the day varies with the season and with latitude.\end{document}
Result
Result

With the same source in report, the title would stand alone on the first page, the abstract alone on the second, and the text would begin on the third.

What a class does not offer produces an error, and the error states it precisely. If \chapter{Statement of the Problem} is written on the fifth line of an article, the command does not exist for that class.

Compilation log
! Undefined control sequence.l.5 \chapter            {Statement of the Problem}

In the same way, an abstract in a book stops at \begin{abstract}.

Compilation log
! LaTeX Error: Environment abstract undefined.

Choosing the class by genre

A criterion follows from the above, and it depends not on the number of pages but on structure and printing. A journal article, a course paper or a short report has no chapters: its class is article. A long report or a thesis has chapters; if it will be printed one-sided, as many universities require, its class is report. A book, or a thesis that will be printed two-sided and bound like a book, calls for book. Now, the criterion admits adjustments: the class options, which come next, allow a report to be printed two-sided, so that a bound thesis that needs an abstract is not obliged to give it up. And if a journal offers its own class, that decision has already been made: its class is used.