amsclass.faq [2000/05/17] American Mathematical Society Frequently asked questions about the AMS documentclasses amsart, amsbook, amsproc, and the amsthm package. Suggestions? Please send mail to tech-support@ams.org. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (1) Question: Where should I look for documentation? Answer: The primary user documentation is found in the "Instructions for Authors". You should be able to find it on your system in the form instr-l.dvi (or .pdf or .ps). If you do not find it on your system, it can be downloaded from http://www.ams.org/tex/author-info.html More detailed information on theorem and proof setup may be found in amsthdoc.tex and thmtest.tex. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (2) Question: I want to make a custom document class based on amsart but with some minor style changes. What is the best way to do it? Answer: The first thing to mention is that \LoadClass is probably not what you want. That works best when the base class is frozen or when changes to the base class are under your control. Therefore the recommended procedure is to copy amsart.cls to myart.cls (or whatever name you choose) and make changes in myart.cls. Even if you wish to work from a .dtx file it is probably best to start with myart.cls and add a .dtx framework around it rather than start from amsclass.dtx, because the latter contains quite a bit of extra complexity in order to generate amsbook.cls, amsproc.cls, amsart.cls, and amsthm.sty from the same source. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (3) Question: All the indents and left margins for numbered lists and other lists are suddenly different in my document that uses document class amsart (amsbook, amsproc). What happened? Answer: Most likely, you (or your system administrator) did a TeX or LaTeX upgrade and you now are getting version 2.0 of the AMS document classes instead of version 1.2. In version 2.0 the default list indents were changed. See also the next question. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (4) Question: My document had numbers of the form "1." "2." etc for first-level enumerate lists, but after a recent upgrade I am getting "(1)" "(2)" etc. How do I get the old style back? Answer: The parenthesized style is AMS in-house style. That it was not being used before was an error in the AMS document classes. If you don't want AMS style it may be that you should use a different document class, or make your own document class as discussed above. The style of numbered lists can, however, be altered in individual documents using standard LaTeX methods: \renewcommand{\labelenumi}{\theenumi.} See Section 6.3 and C.6.2 in "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System" (Lamport). There is also an "enumerate" package distributed with LaTeX that provides more extensive facilities for modifying list numbering on the fly. See Section 3.2 in "The LaTeX Companion" (Goossens, Mittelbach, and Samarin). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (5) Question: I tried to put some figures side by side using minipage and they are positioned badly. Answer: You need to reset \captionindent to 0. (This is a parameter used only by AMS document classes.) For example: \begin{figure} \setlength{\captionindent}{0pt} \begin{minipage}[t]{0.5\textwidth} \centering\includegraphics{left.eps} \caption{This is a caption} \end{minipage}% \begin{minipage}[t]{0.5\textwidth} \centering\includegraphics{right.eps} \caption{This is the other caption} \end{minipage} \end{figure} ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (6) Question: How can I get the qed symbol in the right place when a proof ends with an equation that uses multline* ? Answer: There is a workaround using \tag* and \qedhere, as follows. \begin{proof} With some preliminary text so that we can tell where the right margin falls, which would otherwise be difficult. \begin{multline*} a+b+c+d+e+f+g+h+i+j+k+l+m+n+o+p\\ +q+r+s+t+u+v+w+x+y=z \tag*{\hspace{-1em}\qedhere} \end{multline*} \end{proof} ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (7) Question: The corners of the qed symbol look bad on screen. What can I do to get a better-looking version? Answer: The default qed symbol is drawn with four rules. If your screen is not sufficiently high in resolution then it will not be able to render the corners exactly because of pixel roundoff. There is an easy solution: Redefine \qedsymbol to be some suitable font symbol. Try using \textsquare: \renewcommand{\qedsymbol}{\textsquare} ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (8) Question: When a theorem begins with a list how do I keep the first item from running together with the theorem head? Answer: \begin{thm}\indent\par \begin{enumerate} \item ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (9) Question: When I use the amsthm package with the slides documentclass, the space above and below theorems is too small. Answer: The spacing setup for slides.cls is a bit peculiar. \parskip instead of \topsep is used to control the spacing around theorems---something that seems questionable in general, as well as being different from the behavior of the generic article and book classes. The discrepancy becomes obvious with amsthm because amsthm goes to some trouble to prevent changes in parskip from affecting the space around theorems since book designers normally specify them independently. Workaround: \documentclass{slides} \setlength{\topsep}{\parskip} \usepackage{amsthm} Further spacing adjustments may be needed for other elements. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (10) Question: Why do I get the following error message that I wasn't getting before? ! LaTeX Error: Command \for already defined. ... l.24 \newcommand{\for}{\quad\text{for}\ } (or possibly: ! LaTeX Error: Command \except already defined. ... l.24 \newcommand{\except}{...} Answer: This is a side effect of upgrading from version 1.2 to version 2.0 of the amsart documentclass (or one of the other AMS documentclasses). The easiest solution is to change your newcommand statement to use \renewcommand. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (11) Question: When I use a Latin-1 character in an article title the uppercasing for the running heads does not work correctly. Answer: You have to load the textcase package in order for this to work. This is a widely available package but it is not part of the LaTeX base distribution so the AMS document classes do not assume that it is available. Try: \documentclass{amsart} \usepackage{textcase} ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (12) Question: I discovered that the AMS documentclasses provide an \MR command for putting MR numbers into the bibliography---but when I try to use it I get an error message: ! Undefined control sequence. \MR ...pty ##1\else \textbf {##1:}##2\fi }\MRhref Answer: This is a bug in version 1.2 of amsart and the other AMS documentclasses. It was fixed in version 2.0. As a workaround you can add the following definition in your document preamble: \providecommand{\MRhref}[1]{} ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (13) Question: My title page (using amsbook) doesn't look anything like the published title pages in AMS books. Why not? Answer: The topmatter information provided by an author is processed into a dummy title page that will be used at AMS to prepare (by hand) the `real' title and copyright pages in the appropriate series style. If you want a more elaborate title page while working on your book, you should use the titlepage environment and omit \maketitle. (See the LaTeX documentation regarding use of the titlepage environment if you are not familiar with it.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ (14) Question: I need to put some text between the heading "Index" and the index data in my book (using amsbook). How do i do that? Answer: If you have version 2.05 or later of the amsbook document class, there is a command \indexintro provided for this purpose. Its definition is normally empty, but it can be redefined with \renewcommand to supply the desired introductory text: \renewcommand{\indexintro}{YOUR TEXT HERE} If you have version 2.04 or earlier of the amsbook document class, there is no easy solution; in most cases it will be best to make a custom document class based on amsbook.cls as described in Question 2 above. Then you can change the definition of \indexchap along the following lines to incorporate the desired text: \def\indexchap#1{\global\topskip 7.5pc\relax \twocolumn[{\fontsize{\@xivpt}{18}\bfseries\centering \vskip\topskip\hbox{}\vskip-\baselineskip% adjust top space #1\par \begingroup \normalsize \skip@\topskip \advance\skip@ -\baselineskip \vskip\skip@ \parbox[t]{24pc}{\normalfont YOUR TEXT HERE\par }% \endgroup \global\topskip 24\p@\relax }]% } ------------------------------------------------------------------------