LaTeX ships with four standard classes out of the box: article, report, book, and letter. The mechanism of choosing one with \documentclass is covered on its own page; here we compare what the four actually change — whether they have chapters, print one- or two-sided, and give the title its own page. They are the most portable baseline, working on any engine, but we will also look at the limits of that very plainness.
The four classes
Start with the big picture. **article is the most-used, general-purpose class — for academic papers, short reports, and articles. Its defining trait is that it has no \chapter**; the top sectioning level is \section. **report** does have \chapter and suits longer documents spanning several chapters — technical reports and theses. By default it sets **one-sided (oneside) and gives the title its own separate title page. book** also has \chapter, but for books it defaults to **two-sided (twoside)** and lets you switch between front matter, main matter, and back matter with \frontmatter / \mainmatter / \backmatter. **letter** is for correspondence only, with a command set — \address, \signature, and so on — quite unlike the others.
How you pick a class and write \documentclass[options]{class} in the first place is covered in “Document class & preamble.” This page goes one level deeper, focusing on a side-by-side comparison of the four standard classes.
Compared at a glance
Laying the four side by side reveals the design intent. The deciding questions are: does it have chapters, does it print one- or two-sided, does the title get its own page, and what is it meant for.
| Class | Chapters \chapter | Default sides | Title page | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
article | No (top level is \section) | One-sided | No (shares the first page) | Papers, short reports, articles |
report | Yes | One-sided | Yes (its own page) | Longer reports, theses |
book | Yes | Two-sided | Yes (its own page) | Books |
letter | No (letter-specific structure) | One-sided | No | Letters, correspondence |
The difference between the chaptered report and book is mainly one of layout. book assumes two-sided printing, so left and right margins swap across a spread and chapters open on a right-hand (odd) page by default (openright). report assumes one-sided printing and lets chapters start on any page (openany). The logical content can be identical; what differs is the printing-and-binding assumption.
Options all four accept
The standard classes (all except slides) accept a shared set of options in the brackets of \documentclass[...]{...}. Most are document-wide switches, and note that some have different defaults per class.
10pt/11pt/12pt** — base body font size. Default is10pt.- Paper size —
letterpaper(default),a4paper,a5paper,b5paper,legalpaper,executivepaper. In Japan you almost always seta4paper. twocolumn** — set the body in two columns (default is one column,onecolumn).twoside/oneside** — two- or one-sided layout. Default isoneside, exceptbookdefaults totwoside.titlepage/notitlepage** — whether the title gets its own page.reportandbookdefault totitlepage;articledefaults tonotitlepage.openright/openany** — whether chapters open on a right-hand page or any page.bookdefaults toopenright,reporttoopenany(irrelevant to the chapterlessarticle).fleqn— flush displayed formulas left (default is centered).leqno** — put equation numbers on the left (default is the right).landscape— landscape orientation.draft** — mark overfull boxes with a black bar (default isfinal). **openbib** — set the bibliography in an “open” format.
For example \documentclass[11pt,a4paper,twoside]{report} is an 11pt, A4, two-sided report — we add twoside because report defaults to one-sided. Historically there was also a **slides class for presentations, but it has effectively been superseded by beamer** and is almost never chosen for new work.
A minimal report
Here is a minimal report. \maketitle sets the title metadata on a separate title page (the default for report and book), and the body begins at the first \chapter. In article the title sits on the same page as the body, and \chapter is unavailable — this is the most visible difference between them.
\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{report}
\title{An Experimental Report}
\author{Ada Lovelace}
\date{\today}
\begin{document}
\maketitle % separate title page (report/book default)
\tableofcontents
\chapter{Introduction}
This report has chapters, unlike \texttt{article}.
\chapter{Method}
\section{Apparatus}
Sections live inside chapters here.
\end{document}Switch this to book and it becomes two-sided; add \frontmatter and everything up to the table of contents is numbered in roman numerals (i, ii, …), while \mainmatter resets to arabic numerals at Chapter 1. The front/main/back-matter mechanism unique to book is covered in detail in “Document class & preamble.”
How letter is structured
letter is built quite differently from the other three. The sender details — \address{...} (your own address) and \signature{...} (your sign-off name) — go in the preamble and are shared across all letters. Each letter itself is a letter environment whose argument is the recipient’s address. The body begins with \opening{...} (the salutation) and ends with \closing{...} (the complimentary close). There is no title page and no \maketitle.
\documentclass{letter}
\address{1 Computing Way \\ London} % sender, in the preamble
\signature{Ada Lovelace}
\begin{document}
\begin{letter}{Charles Babbage \\ 2 Engine Road} % recipient = argument
\opening{Dear Mr.\ Babbage,}
Thank you for the notes on the Analytical Engine.
\closing{Yours sincerely,}
\cc{The Royal Society}
\encl{Two diagrams}
\end{letter}
\end{document}Place several letter environments in one file and you can produce any number of letters to different recipients while sharing one sender. After \closing you may add \cc{...} for carbon-copy recipients, \encl{...} to list enclosures, and \ps for a postscript. Line breaks within an address are separated with \\.
Where the standard classes stop
The standard classes are a portable baseline: present on every installation, needing nothing extra, and safe for long-term archiving. Starting here is the sensible default. But once you want fine control over page design — heading styles, headers and footers, precise margins — their dated design makes such tuning awkward.
When that happens, move to an alternative class. KOMA-Script (scrartcl / scrreprt / scrbook) and memoir offer cleaner default typography and a rich configuration interface, and are widely used as drop-in successors to the standard classes (see “Alternative classes”). For presentation slides, the standard choice is beamer, not slides.
Japanese is a different matter. The standard classes such as article were not designed for Japanese typesetting and do not get character spacing, line spacing, or Latin–Japanese spacing right. So you use jsclasses (jsarticle / jsbook) on pLaTeX / upLaTeX, ltjsclasses on LuaLaTeX, or the newer jlreq (see “js-based classes”). If you write in Japanese, start from these rather than the standard classes.