\
documentclass
command at the top of the
document. So a document starting
may be called “an article document”. This is a good scheme, but it has a glaring flaw: the actual typographical designs provided by the LaTeX class files aren’t widely liked. The way around this is to refine the class. To refine a class, a programmer may write a new class file that loads an existing class, and then does its own thing with the document design. If the user finds such a refined class, all is well, but if not, the common way is to load a package (or several). The LaTeX distribution, itself, provides rather few package files, but there are lots of them, by a wide variety of authors, to be found on the archives. Several packages are designed just to adjust the design of a document — using such packages achieves what the programmer might have achieved by refining the class. Other packages provide new facilities: for example, the graphics package (actually provided as part of any LaTeX distribution) allows the user to load externally-provided graphics into a document, and the hyperref package enables the user to construct hyper-references within a document. On disc, class and package files only appear different by virtue of their name “extension” — class files are called *.cls while package files are called *.sty. Thus we find that the LaTeX standard article class is represented on disc by a file called article.cls, while the hyperref package is represented on disc by a file called hyperref.sty. The class vs. package distinction was not clear in LaTeX 2.09 — everything was called a style (“document style” or “document style option”). It doesn’t really matter that the nomenclature has changed: the important requirement is to understand what other people are talking about.\
documentclass{article}
This answer last edited: 2013-10-21
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