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KOMA-Script

Versatile LaTeX classes and packages

Reine Portfolio-Übung, vollständig selbst entwickelt. Kein offizieller Auftritt – die Website steht in keinem Zusammenhang mit dem LaTeX-Paket KOMA-Script und wird auch nicht von dessen Entwicklern betrieben.

This is purely a portfolio project, developed entirely on my own. This is not an official site—the website is in no way affiliated with the LaTeX package KOMA-Script and is not operated by its developers.

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© 2026 Moritz Kohm

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  2. About KOMA-Script

About KOMA-Script

History, goals and philosophy behind KOMA-Script — the modern alternative to the standard LaTeX classes.

What is KOMA-Script?

KOMA-Script is a comprehensive bundle of classes and packages for LaTeX. It provides highly configurable replacements for the standard document classes article, report, and book, plus a dedicated letter class scrlttr2.

The classes are rooted in European typographic tradition and follow the recommendations of classical typesetting — adapted to modern LaTeX.

History

The project started in 1992 — even before the release of LaTeX 2ε — when Markus Kohm ported the Script2 styles from LaTeX 2.09 to the new class system. The first public release followed in 1993. KOMA-Script has continuously evolved since then, and today is one of the most widely used LaTeX class bundles worldwide.

Over the years, not only did the features of the KOMA-Script classes grow, but many additional packages emerged around the bundle. Despite occasional contributors — for parts of the documentation or for the original letter class — KOMA-Script has at its core always remained a one-person show.

The Documentation Project

Part of the KOMA-Script ecosystem used to be the “KOMA-Script Documentation Project” (komascript.de). Originally launched and funded by Robin Kroha on Zope, it was one of the first German-language LaTeX forums — long before GitHub or Codeberg. Later the whole project was migrated to Drupal.

The hope of distributing maintenance across many shoulders did not materialise in the long run: spam, attacks, and administrative work increasingly landed on the KOMA-Script author's plate. The forum was eventually closed to community contributions, and content worth preserving was transferred to the SourceForge wiki — available in both German and English.

Splitting into smaller projects

Since 2018, KOMA-Script has been progressively split into smaller, standalone projects. The main goal is to break down the bundle's significant complexity into manageable pieces — so that, in the long term, the work can be spread across multiple people. Many of those spin-off packages can be found in the Friends section.

Markus Kohm describes the mission statement of the official KOMA-Script site in his own words like this:

“The purpose of this site is to provide information about certain aspects of KOMA-Script and my — KOMA's — other projects. The whole thing has more of a blog-like character than a wiki. In addition, there are also drafts and collections of ideas. The fact that these cannot simply be publicly commented on by anyone here is part of the concept.”

— Source: koma-script.sourceforge.io

KOMA-Script is part of most LaTeX distributions — it ships with TeX Live, MiKTeX, and MacTeX by default. A manual install is usually not needed.

Documentation

The official KOMA-Script manual is written in LaTeX and has been thoroughly revised multiple times. A special feature of its sources: they produce both the free manual and the German KOMA-Script-Buch — only a few additional files are needed for the book. This dual-output approach leads to some peculiarities in the LaTeX source.

Philosophy

KOMA-Script follows three guiding principles:

  1. Configurability without breakage. Thousands of options allow customisation without compromising document structure.
  2. Typographic correctness. Defaults follow the rules of classical typesetting — not the conventions of word processors.
  3. Local adaptability. Built-in support for German, Swiss, French, US, and Japanese conventions.

Author

KOMA-Script has been developed primarily by Markus Kohm for over three decades. Community contributions are welcome — especially via the spin-off projects on GitHub and Codeberg.

License

KOMA-Script is released under the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) 1.3c and may be freely used, distributed, and modified — as long as the LPPL terms are respected.