amsclass.faq  [1999/12/16] 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.

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(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.

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(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.

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(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.

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(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).

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(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}

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(6) 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}

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(7) 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 ...

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(8) 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.

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(9) 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.

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(10) 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}
  ...

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(11) 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]{}
