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I have the problem that I have to write scientific reports for a company. I would love to use LaTeX for this as I have some experience with it when I wrote my thesis. However the report needs to be styled in corporate design with the corporate logo placed on the first page and some special lines on every page.

I have the measures for the layout but I do not know how to start customizing. Maybe writing a new class is the way to go. I also looked into the KOMA script letter class, maybe there is something possible based on this?

lockstep
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GorillaPatch
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2 Answers2

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Nobody would argue with you if you base your style on the Reports of the US Army Corps of Engineers. It is a great looking class for this type of document.

The class can easily be changed to suit your Company's style, although normally the front cover will have to match the color scheme of the Company's branding.

enter image description here

It is always better to start from a base class that approximates what you are after. The class is based on standard report class. One other issue with adapting such templates, is that you should rather adopt them for use with XeLaTeX to make the use of system fonts more easily available to the user. This one uses Georgia as the main font.

yannisl
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  • Wow Yiannis, that is impressing. I need a much simpler class with a different first page. But if I understand the class correctly and learn how this works, it will open up many possibilities. – GorillaPatch Nov 02 '11 at 20:27
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    @Gorilla Patch You can always get help from the community here. My suggestion set some time to read through the class and adopt changes step by step. The title might give you a prooblem. One easy way out it is to include most of the difficult parts as images. – yannisl Nov 03 '11 at 09:16
  • @GorillaPatch I recently adapted the EDRC class for our reports and it is impressive. I removed certain features and inserted others to trim the class to our needs. – Leeser Nov 03 '11 at 15:26
  • I have another question: knowing the report class from the KOMA package as I have written my thesis with it, I think a report class is a bit hefty. An article would do the trick as well. maybe it is possible to modify the article class a similar way the report class has been customized in your example? or maybe article and report class are fundamentally different under the hood? – GorillaPatch Nov 04 '11 at 21:16
  • @GorillaPatch What type of reports are these long, short? I have a feeling you will have difficulty with article. It will probably be the same trouble in any case. – yannisl Nov 04 '11 at 22:24
  • I think it will be short reports with at most 10 pages. That is why I think that the additional chapter hierarchy which is usefull for long documents is just overkill. An optional cover page with mostly text-based elements (title, author, date, etc.) would be nice. – GorillaPatch Nov 05 '11 at 10:40
  • @GorillaPatch You right then it becomes much easier. Starting from KOMA in this case maybe is also a good idea if you know it. – yannisl Nov 05 '11 at 12:23
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Use the geometry package to adjust the layout. For example:

\usepackage{geometry} 
\geometry{height=10in,a5paper,hmargin={3cm,0.8in}}

See the package documentation for more details or the numerous questions on this site.

As far as placing the logo you coud place it in the header/footer as Martin has commented. See for example:

  1. Add logo on each page.

  2. Align text and logo in footer

Community
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Peter Grill
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