I'm using the TeX Live distribution and I've noticed that there are a lot of document class files (291 actually) for different things (books, math, thesis, presentations, etc).
What are your preferred ones and in which case would you use each of them?
Best Answer
Call me old fashioned, but my favorite classes are things like
book,articleandreport. The "do-it-all" classes like Koma-script and memoir are great when you actually need all those features, but I'm more of a Unix-philosophy person myself: a piece of software should do one thing and do it well. A document class should only be a document class, A package for doing X should only be a package for doing X. That way, things are modular. I can load exactly as many packages, and use exactly as many resources, as I need: nothing more. And almost all packages are made and tested on the core document classes, so while you may need to worry about packages clashing with each other (--though not so much if they follow the UNIX philosophy, though), you don't need to worry about packages not working with your document class.There's the added benefit that most advice and samples you find online use them too. ;)