HowTo_ClassSelection

How to choose the correct class

This question is not easy to answer in this general form. Before choosing the class, you should plan the document. This includes, in particular, creating a rough outline and estimating how the most important elements will look. After that, you can categorize the document. Only then can you estimate whether it is more of an article/working paper, a report or a book. Which class is best suited for what is not clear. But you can get some hints from the name of the class.

scrartcl stands for script article, which is an article class.Articles are usually short texts, which are often published together with other texts or are to be seen in a context with other texts. These are for example real journal articles, articles in an anthology or to a lecture series, but also working papers. Here, then, there is the contact point with reports. A seminar paper, for example, is a kind of report concerning a part of a lecture series or a kind of working report. For me, it's an article that has to be seen in the context of the other seminar papers on the same seminar. A bachelor, master or diploma thesis is also a work report and at the same time a scientific paper. However, this is primarily an independent work. Also from the size at least the master and diploma thesis usually exceeds what a usual article reaches.

scrreprt stands for script report, a report class. It is basically suitable for master and diploma theses, partly also for bachelor theses. If we are honest, bachelor theses often result in a rather small report in terms of size. At the latest with the dissertation, which is still published as a book in many disciplines, but partly also already with multi-part master or diploma theses, we then cross the boundaries from report to book.

scrbook stands for script book, i.e. a book class. Thus the class is not only suitable as a basis for many kinds of books - though less for literary works, but rather for technical books - but also for dissertations and many a master and diploma thesis or for lecture notes (this is the origin of the LaTeX 2.09 predecessor of the class and that's where the name part "script" comes from).

By the way: Some people might be surprised, but the German KOMA-Script book, whose layout actually does not remind of scrbook, is actually typeset with scrbook. This shows how versatile and flexible this class actually is.

It is clear that especially at the borderline between the three document classes the decision is often difficult. In the case of scientific papers, the distinction between a report with scrreprt and a book with scrbook is particularly fluid. However, especially the later change between these two classes is very easy. Besides, most of the differences are only in different defaults. Very few statements like \frontmatter, \mainmatter, \backmatter or the abstract environment exist only in one of the two classes.

But also the change from scrartcl to scrreprt and back is often not as complex as it first appears. Basically, the heading hierarchy can be adjusted with search/replace. For optimization, some \cleardoublepage can then be replaced if necessary and some options can be adjusted. This is actually usually done very quickly.