The Memoir Class for Configurable Typesetting: User Guide

Abstract

The memoir class and this manual have seen many changes since they first saw the light of day. The major functions, and extensions to them, were listed in the various introductions to the previous editions of this manual and it would now be tedious to read them. The memoir class was first released in 2001 and since then has proven to be reasonably popular. The class can be used as a replacement for the book and report classes, by default generating documents virtually indistinguisable from ones produced by those classes. The class includes some options to produce documents with other appearances; for example an article class look or one that looks as though the document was produced on a typewriter with a single font, double spacing, no hyphenation, and so on. In the following I use the term ‘standard class’ to denote the book and report classes and, when appropriate, the article class as well. The memoir class includes the functionality of many packages, for instance the tocloft package for controlling the table of contents or methods similar to the fancyhdr package for designing your own headers. The built-in package functions are mainly related to document design and layout; memoir does not touch upon areas like those that are covered by the babel or hyperref packages or any related to typesetting mathematics. On the other hand it is easy to configure a work produced with memoir to meet a university’s thesis layout requirements. The memoir class has improved substantially since it was first released — over 50 La-TeXers have provided code or suggestions for improvements. The class is included in the TeX Users Group TeX distributions and the latest version of the class and its supporting documentation is always available from CTAN(at)latex/contrib/memoir. This is not a guide to the general use of LaTeX but rather concentrates on where The memoir class differs from the standard LaTeX book and report classes. There are othersources that deal with LaTeX in general, some of which are noted later. I assume that youhave already used LaTeX and therefore know how to prepare a LaTeX manuscript, how torun LaTeX and print the resulting document, and that you can also use auxiliary programs like MakeIndex and BibTeX.