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I need to make a fairly large report. It requires a cherry-picked APA style, meaning that it uses some of it, and other things are not APA-compliant. I think I won't have problems dealing with the font, margins and spacing.

My question is how to modify the \section, \subsection, \subsubsection to match APA if I use a class like article or report. One of the most important requirements is that this APA compliant outline shows in the table of contents.

I don't think customizing apa or apa6e is possible/practical. Any ideas?

ravl1084
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    Could you copy the definitions of the \section, etc commands from the apa.cls documentclass file to whatever class file you're building? – Mico Jan 18 '12 at 02:19
  • Alternatively, if you have the actual APA specifications, you can probably set up the sectioning easily using the titlesec package. There are plenty of examples on the site of its use. – Alan Munn Jan 18 '12 at 03:02

1 Answers1

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A practical and quick approach would be to modify the apa6e class. The class is rather short being only about 130 lines of code, as it uses a lot of packages to implement the APA style guidelines. The class is also well documented.

You will need to load either the report or preferably the book class rather than the original article class that apa6e.cls is based on. In the apa6e.cls file change line 47 from:

 \LoadClass[12pt]{article}

to

 \LoadClass[12pt]{book}

Do the same for whatever else you need to modify.

I would preferably though, change the .dtx file rather than the .cls file, in order to document the class properly.

Don't forget to acknowledge the original author's contribution, if you distribute your files.

yannisl
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  • I have never edited a class before. Is there a particular folder where it should go? – ravl1084 Jan 18 '12 at 16:57
  • @ravl1084 As long as is on the default path tree, is ok. To start with, save it in your working directory. First find the original apa6e.dtx and apa6e.ins files and saved them under different names. When you edit the .dtx you need to Latex the .ins file as well, if you read through the files you will see where you need to edit the class name. If you have any problems, just post a comment or a new question. – yannisl Jan 18 '12 at 17:21
  • I edited the class and got a new .cls. I made a folder in the same place where apa6e is and put it there, but running latexmk, it is not found. Is there a command to update the list of .cls files? – ravl1084 Jan 18 '12 at 18:22
  • @ravl1084 Have a look at this post http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/14678/963 – yannisl Jan 18 '12 at 18:29