Latex styles - what do you use and where to find them

Question

What Latex styles do you use and where do you find them?

The reason I'm asking this is that it seems that some 99.9999% of all styles on the internet are copies of each other and of a physics exam paper

However, when you try to find a style for a paper like this one... Good luck, you are never going to find it.

Creating your own style is often not really an option, because it requires you to dig quite deep into the very advanced features of TeX/LaTeX and fighting your way against possible incompatibilities with document classes/packages/whatnot.

Answer 1

LaTeX was originally designed as a reasonably flexible system on which a few standard classes were distributed — that were themselves rather inflexible.

In the current state of affairs, if you want a custom layout, you need to write a few amount of supporting code yourself. How else would it happen? It's not like HTML+CSS gives you templates to work with; you need to implement the design yourself.

Creating your own style is often not really an option

Ah, well, not unless you know how to program in LaTeX!

Seriously, it all depends on knowing where to start and what to build on top of. That catalogue you give as an example would, in my opinion, be reasonably easy to do in LaTeX; it's just a bunch of boxes.

You could write something like

\newcommand\catalogueEntry[4]{%
  \parbox[t]{0.23\linewidth}{\textbf{#1}}%
  \hfill
  \parbox[t]{0.23\linewidth}{\includegraphics{#2}}%
  \hfill
  \parbox[t]{0.23\linewidth}{\textbf{Characteristics}\\ #3}%
  \hfill
  \parbox[t]{0.23\linewidth}{\textbf{Application}\\ #4}
}

and use it as so

\catalogueEntry{Spotlights}{spotlight.jpg}
  {Eclipse spotlights are...}
  {Narrow to medium...}

This is just a basic illustration of what could be knocked up quickly — much more sophistication could be used to turn this into a more flexible system.

I see LaTeX as an extensible markup system. If you separate your markup from its presentation on the page, it's not too hard to get your information represented in whichever form you wish. But getting started is a little tricky, I have to admit; the learning curve for LaTeX programming can be rather steep.

Answer 2

Memoir is a more flexible document class than the default ones, and its manual is excellent.

Answer 3

Well I think CTAN is the best resource for LaTeX and TeX-related stuff. Also lots of scientific organizations provide their own styles, it makes sense to try tracing who was the author/publisher of the paper you like and check their websites.