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I have been looking for THE manual for using class 'article' in LaTex. The official CTAN package site points to some documentation which actually is 'an introduction to writing classes and packages for LATEX'; it does not cover how to use the article package.

I need to, for instance, check what is the command for inserting affiliations, or to place in-text references, among other typical tasks you will do while preparing a scientific paper. I would like to have the official way to do that at hand. Looking in Google for those commands returns disparate solutions relying on additional packages. And that is something I must avoid because of editorial regulations.

Can you please provide the link to a standard manual?

Jaqo
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    Welcome to TeX.SE! Much of the information you say you're looking for -- e.g., how to cross-reference items -- is not specific to the article document class, and you will thus not find it in a discussion of what this document class does or does not do. For some of the introductory-level material, I suggest you study carefully the document The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e by Oetiker et al. – Mico Sep 13 '14 at 18:58
  • Thanks for your help, @Mico. I quickly checked it, but could not find an explicit reference to affiliations. Do you have any suggestion for invoking it in a standard "article" .tex? – Jaqo Sep 13 '14 at 19:21
  • The display of affiliations is generally done by the \author macro. In practice, the issue of just how to display authors' affiliations comes up most urgently when you're submitting a paper to a journal. Fortunately, most journals that accept LaTeX input provide specialized document classes (e.g, elsarticle for Elsevier-affiliated journals) that provide their own syntax for listing authors and affiliations. This removes all the guesswork (and creativity!) out of the question of how to display those pesky affiliations... – Mico Sep 13 '14 at 19:39
  • The journal I am submitting to only states: LATEX USERS: Please use "article" class for LaTeX submissions and include any associated packages/files with the submitted LaTeX source files. I wished they provided the class for formatting things out objectively. Unfortunately, this is not the case. – Jaqo Sep 13 '14 at 20:38

3 Answers3

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Type texdoc article in a terminal.

erik
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  • That doesn't work in my system (MiKTeX 2.9 64 bits on Windows 7 Pro). Documentation for article could not be found. – skpblack Sep 13 '14 at 19:16
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    How about texdoc classes? – erik Sep 13 '14 at 19:18
  • Thanks for this, @erik. I think I will be able to solve cross references with this documentation. Do you know what could be a native way to state affiliations: without importing additional packages? – Jaqo Sep 13 '14 at 19:19
  • it's not worth it – skpblack Sep 13 '14 at 19:21
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    @Jaqo http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1408/where-to-put-the-institute-information-in-the-article-document-class – erik Sep 13 '14 at 19:24
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It looks like the journal you're contemplating submitting your paper to requires you to use the article class but doesn't provide any real guidelines regarding the layout of the title and author blocks. I would therefore go with a minimalist layout. For instance,

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\setlength\textheight{2.35in} %% just for this example
\title{Some interesting findings\thanks{%
Our research was not supported by any foundations.}}
\author{First1 Last1\thanks{%
Department of XYZ, University of So-and-So, Nowhere-in-Particular.}
\and
First2 Last2\thanks{%
Department of ABC, College of Been-There-Done-That, Middle-of-Nowhere.}}
\date{September 2014}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\end{document}
Mico
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  • Thanks again for your detailed help, @Mico. As soon as I get 15 reputation points, I will give your comment a +1 for being native and minimalist. Could you please suggest how to use this approach in a case in which you have an additional third author who is affiliated to the two institutions already set? How could I add an additional foot note for correspondence data at the end of the name of one of the authors? – Jaqo Sep 15 '14 at 08:40
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    @Jaqo - Unless the affiliations are long and elaborate, there's not much to be gained by providing repeated footnotes markers and combined footnotes; I wouldn't worry about repeating some material in consecutive \thanks macros. It's also not a problem to provide two \thanks statements for one of the authors and to state correspondence information in the second \thanks. Incidentally, if you do want to (or need to) provide a somewhat more sophisticated look for the author block, you should check out the authblk package. – Mico Sep 15 '14 at 09:14
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A search for "article" on texdoc.net suggests

/texmf-dist/doc/latex/base/classes.pdf

which seems like the documentation for \documentclass{article}, as well as report and book. This PDF is dated 2014/09/29.

Evgeni Sergeev
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