A LaTeX style for writing an SAE Technical Paper

The SAE Technical meetings are one of the most important publication medium for the research I am doing. Unfortunately, the SAE did not accept papers typeset in LaTeX by now. After many frustrating days trying to get a few so called wysiwyg text processors to behave in a reasonable way, I made up my mind and attempted to write an own style meeting the requirements of SAE. I had only been a LaTeX user by then, and I had no idea about how to change a title page, section styles and the fonts for a whole document.

I hope the style will be useful for many authors, especially for those making extensive use of mathematical formula.

The first step was of course to ask AltaVista, where I - after a while - found a link to LaTeX2e for class and package writers. This helped me a lot. Many of the problems I encountered during the five days of creation could be solved with the help of The LaTeX Companion by Goossens, Mittelbach and Samarin.

The sae document class inherits all from the article class. However, the definition of the title page within the article class was not suitable. So I had a look at the article.cls file to find out how I should write this. The problem was finally solved by creating saveboxes. This makes it possible to add as many author/affiliation pairs as wished. With each \AddAuthor command the old savebox is redefined and the new two lines are appended. The \SAECopyright command takes a year as the only argument, the surrounding text is created by the style.

I have tested the style with a TeTeX (version pre0.9) distribution containing LaTeX (Web2C 7.2) 3.14159 and pdfTeX (Web2C 7.2) 3.14159-0.12r. The style has been tested with MiKTeX as well. The geometry style required by the latest version can be obtained from your closest CTAN mirror (teTeX has it installed by default!). Search for geometry at http://www.ctan.org/search/. Download the files geometry.dtx, geometry.ins and Readme. Follow the instructions in the Readme file.

The style can be downloaded here. The copyright notice is included in the file. The old version (before 2000-06-28) can still be obtained here.

2002-07-22	The class now produces one-column output by default. To obtain the two-column output required by SAE, use the new option final. For double-spaced output, use the new option draft.
2000-06-28	Cleaned up the code. Now using geometry package instead of \setlength{}{} commands. New pdftex option, which is forwarded to the article class and the geometry package.
2000-08-28	Due to numerous questions I received during the past weeks, I decided to add a few instructions on how to obtain the geometry.sty file which is obviously missing in some TeX-distributions.

I put an example in the same directory. It should explain most. Please contact me if you get trouble using the style. Tell me what kind of LaTeX version you're using.

The class is compatible with the hyperref package and pdflatex and can be used to produce PDF files suitable for electronic publication and printing. There are no features in sae.cls which could prevent the usage together with other packages. I recommend the graphicx, natbib and tabularx styles to include figures, handle citations and build tables, respectively.

• While working on the paper, it can be convenient to have it formatted one-column and with double line spacing. This can be accomplished by inserting

  \onecolumn
  \renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{2}\small\normalsize
  

  just in front of \begin{document}.
• The insertion of the commands

  \widowpenalty=10000
  \clubpenalty=10000

  in the beginning of the document suppresses widows and orphans (single lines on the top or bottom of the page).
• The inclusion of the line

  \usepackage[pdftex,pdfpagemode=None,colorlinks=true,urlcolor=black,%
  linkcolor=black,citecolor=black,pdfstartview=FitH]{hyperref}

  loads the hyperref package with options suitable for generation of a PDF-file containing links. Each \cite{} and \ref{} command triggers the insertion of a link to the corresponding target (image, bibliography item etc.) in the PDF. Useful for online-publication. Requires pdfTeX.