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Although I'm a TeX/LaTeX neophyte, I've taken on a rather ambitious project of updating Differential Calculus with SAGE. As I go along I'm using the existing tex document to teach myself what each piece of code does. And right at the start, I'm stumped.

Line 5 of the master file reads

\documentclass[10pt,runningheads]{book}

but I can't find any place where this option is documented. There are only blank lines and comments above this, and googling for "latex documentclass runningheads" hasn't resulted in any useful information.

As a side question, I suppose that I'm also wondering if there's any definitive place to go for documentation on all of the LaTeX macros and their options.

Werner
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Chuck
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1 Answers1

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A specification of the form

\documentclass[<optA>,<optB>,...,<optN>]{<class>}

applies any of the options <optA>,...,<optN> to <class>. Some might not apply to <class> and is stored in a macro \@unusedoptionlist. Some of these options may apply when loading a package

\usepackage[<opts>]{<package>}

as well. Any remaining \@unusedoptionlist entries will cause a warning. source2e briefly mentions this (p 62):

\@unusedoptionlist

List of options of the main class that haven’t been declared or loaded as class option files.

Since there is no reference to runningheads in book.cls (the original source), it must apply to another package (perhaps one dealing with headers/footers).

Werner
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    One may know for certain where runningheads applies to by issuing \makeatletter \show\@unusedoptionlist \makeatother throughout the document preamble, and see where it could get gobbled up... without greater detail of the preamble it's not easy to know. – Werner Feb 22 '15 at 05:55
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    I suspect this is just a leftover from a copy-paste from a document using the Springer llncs document class which has runningheads as class option to include the title and some other info in the header. – Gonzalo Medina Feb 22 '15 at 06:01
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    I don't want to paste the entire preamble here, but you can find it at https://github.com/chivalry/differential-calculus-and-sage/blob/master/wdjoyner-files/latex/granville-calculus.tex. There is a later delcaration of \usepackage{fancyheadings}, so perhaps it's to do with that. I haven't yet researched the packages that are included. – Chuck Feb 22 '15 at 06:04
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    @Chuck fancyheadings is an obsolete package superseded by fancyhdr. I found this old documentation for the former http://www.fi.infn.it/pub/tex/doc/orig/fancyheadings.pdf and no mention of runningheads. – Gonzalo Medina Feb 22 '15 at 06:13
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    @GonzaloMedina, well, that's part of my cleanup duties. :) This project was last updated in '08 or so, so that's probably why it's using obsolete packages. – Chuck Feb 22 '15 at 06:27
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    @Chuck: Related: How to keep up with packages and know which ones are obsolete? – Werner Feb 22 '15 at 06:28
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    '08 well perhaps. fancyheadings was obsoleted by fancyhdr (by the same author) in 1994 name change motivated by requirements of use with MSDOS and ISO format CDs:-) – David Carlisle Feb 22 '15 at 10:49