I recently discovered journal style guides and have found them to be an incredible source of information about style recommendations. In particular, I've learned a lot from the AMS and APS style guides. I feel that these guides have done a better job of specifying styles than what I've done myself in the past.
I prefer the APS style somewhat to the AMS style and am planning to use \documentclass[twocolumn, secnumarabic, amssymb, nobibnotes, aps, prd]{revtex4-2} for my own reports, articles, etc. This mostly won't be for published works, and I doubt I'll ever submit anything to an APS journal. Is there any reason why using this documentclass when not submitting to an APS journal is a bad idea?
One thing I'd like to avoid is to decide at some point in the future that I no longer like the APS style and realize that I have a lot of work ahead of me porting documents over to a different style. From what I can tell so far, the environments and commands in the revtex class seem to be fairly compatible with other classes. For example, table/table* and figure/figure* are not revtex-specific.
Should I be wary of any package incompatibilities when using revtex (or amsart, etc.)? I haven't noticed any incompatibilities so far.
Best Answer
I can assure you that there is no restriction from the AMS on using AMS document classes even if you are not submitting your work to the AMS for publication. (I was, before retirement, part of the AMS publications technical support team since before TeX existed.) I can't say absolutely that use of the APS class is similarly unrestricted, but believe that to be so.
The AMS classes were constructed to be parallel to the basic LaTeX classes in particular so that a document could be composed using one of the basic classes and then transferred to the comparable AMS class with minimal adjustments, those restricted mainly to the top matter (author addresses, email, thanks, etc.).
To determine whether changing the class after substantial work has been done will be painless, you might benefit from an experiment. Think hard about what features you will need or want, and construct a small experimetal document using these features. Process it with the appropriate basic class, say `article'. Then change the class to the one you fancy, changing nothing other than the class. Process it, examine the output, and observe what error or warning messages are produced. Try the same with your second-preferred class. You should get a pretty good idea of what problems you might encounter should you change your mind.
Keep your experimental document around, adding features as you find you need them, or encounter problems working on your actual documents, then run the upgraded version through the same tests. Be sure to make good notes for future reference.