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I was looking at the post How to disable automatic indentation on new paragraphs? and the given comments. It was suggested that I go to Ask Question. Which is what I am doing now.

Somebody was asking there, how paragraph indents may be "disabled without changing the template". But I do not know what that means. The way I understand it, you cannot change a package by giving various LaTeX-commands inside a .tex-file. Am I mistaken ?

Community
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user35145
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  • You can override commands defined in a package with macros in your document after you have invoked \usepackage. You may need \renewcommand to do that. There's no official LaTeX "template" - that usually refers to a document class or a package. You're always welcome to ask particular questions here about what you want to do in your document. – Ethan Bolker Nov 02 '14 at 15:56

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A package file is a file (usually of macro definitions) ending in .sty that has a specific syntactic use in LaTeX, included with commands such as

\usepackage

and with internal tests such as 

\@ifpackageloaded

template doesn't have a specific meaning in latex itself, it is usually just used to mean an example document that people can use "as a template". Some editors may have a template mechanism to start new documents with some boiler plate code for a letter or a an article or presentation etc, but any such template menu is a feature of the editor not of latex.

Separately The experimental LaTeX3 code has an xtemplate package that defines a template declaration mechanism which is using the word with a different meaning, templates there are a specific way of using a key=value interface do customise environments.

David Carlisle
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A template consists of predefined layouts, mostly specific for a single purpose, i.e. as a cover or something similar for a thesis etc.

Packages are most times designed to provide general setups which can be used in a multitude of documents (in templates too, of course)

Basically, any setting in a template as well in a package can be overruled (though not advisable) using

  • \def

  • \renewcommand

  • \xpatchcmd (or \patchcmd) from xpatch or etoolbox

More sophicistated approaches use RenewDocumentCommand from xparse and the features of LaTeX 3

Lengths etc. can be set as well with \setlength etc. as well counters given new values.

Basically, nothing is really fixed