LaTeX2e class for A&A

LaTeX2e v6.1 class for Astronomy & Astrophysics

What's New in AA v6.1 (June 2006)

All dimensions of the printed text have been modified.
There is one more line in the page and the width of the columns is larger.
The baselineskip of the text is smaller.
Fonts in tables and references are also 1pt less.

Letter to the Editor

The page layout of the letters has been changed and a new option added:
\documentclass[letter]{aa}

Long tables and Online material

Use the packages "longtable" (and "lscape") of the standart distributions to enter your large tables.
Some informations for online tables (and online material) have been added in aa.dem and the user's guide.

Other

Each appendix has to be written with the environment
\begin{appendix} ... \end{appendix}

What's New in AA v6.0

Structured Abstract

A new concept ``Structured Abstract'' is implemented with this new version, see Editorial 441, E3-E6, 2005.
Just like a traditional abstract, a structured abstract summarizes the content of the paper, but it does make the structure of the article explicit and visible. For doing so, the structured abstract uses headings that define several short paragraphs.
Three paragraphs, entitled respectively Aims, Methods, and Results, are mandatory.
When appropriate, the structured abstract may use an introductory paragraph entitled Context, and a final paragraph entitled Conclusions.
The abstract should accurately summarize the paper's content, be limited to 300 words, and be self-contained (no references, no abbreviations or acronyms except for the truly obvious and familiar ones).
- The command \abstract{} has been changed in \abstract{}{}{}{}{}.
- A counter of words has been added with an error message if it's > 300 words.
- Citations in an abstract display an error message.

Research Note

A new option has been added in the aa.cls class.
\documentclass[rnote]{aa}
The word (Research Note) is automatically added in the title and (RN) and in the running title.

Long lists of authors and institutes

In articles that are the result of consortia, the number of authors and the list of affiliations are very long.
A new option has been added in the aa.cls class.
\documentclass[longauth]{aa}
In this case, all the institutes are set below the references.

The following files are part of the macro package AA

readme.txt: Information (equivalent to this page)
aa.cls: The document class file
aadoc.pdf: User's Guide (pdf)
aadoc.ps: User's Guide (ps)
aa.dem: Example of an article (LaTeX source)
- Directory for BIBTeX style
- aa.bst: Bibliography style file
- natbib.sty: This package reimplements the LaTeX \cite command
- natnotes.dvi: Brief reference sheet for Natbib (dvi)
- natnotes.pdf: Brief reference sheet for Natbib (pdf)
- natnotes.ps: Brief reference sheet for Natbib (ps)

All files are compressed in a single archive:
aa-package.tar.gz

History

The new 2001 Astronomy and Astrophysics journal.
In order to ensure the smoothest transition for both authors and publishers, Springer-Verlag has kindly granted EDP Sciences the permission to use the LaTeX macro package that they developed for A&A Main journal.
Only minor changes have been incorporated between the Springer class (1999) and the EDP Sciences class for the new journal.
Please, note:
- that the abstract is now a command (\abstract{...}) and not an environment, so the \maketitle command has to be placed after the abstract and the keywords
- and that the command \thesaurus does no longer exist.
The journal is now printing using the Postscript TX Times-fonts.
The TX fonts consist of virtual text roman fonts using Adobe Times with some modified and additional text symbols.
The TX fonts are distributed under the GNU public license and are available in the LaTeX distributions since December 2000.
In any case, these fonts and the installation guide are also available in every public TeX archive server, i.e.:
http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/fonts/txfonts/
ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/fonts/txfonts/
ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/txfonts/
Please contact your system administrator to install it.
Since this change of fonts results in a slightly different page make-up from CM fonts, we encourage you to use TX fonts. To proceed, all you need is:
\documentclass{aa}
\usepackage{txfonts}
...
The differences between the 5.1 (June 2001) version and the 5.2 (June 2002) version consist of some minor changes allowing you to use the package txfonts for Times fonts. The differences between the 5.2 (June 2002) version and the 5.3 (June 2003) version consist of the addition of the \Online command (see the user guide) and a correction in the aa.bst style for references with identical set of authors. Only minor changes have been incorporated in AA v5.4 (the pagelayout is well adapted for A4 and Letter format, some new journals macros have been added and some examples of particular tables have been added in aa.dem or in the User's Guide).