What is the advantage of using minimal document class over article document class when creating a standalone graphic?
Bonus question:
Before I have time to make a test by myself, is there anybody here know whether minimal will compile faster than article?
The minimal class has already empty page style, so no page number is printed. There's no page number needed for a standalone graphic.
minimal doesn't define macros. There's less than in article which could disturb.
However, usually I would use minimal just for testing or for showing a minimal working example. Though for just displaying a graphic it might be sufficient.
For creating graphics you might miss features which are provided by other base classes. Just some examples, important if you create graphics with text:
You cannot use common font size commands such as \small and \large, they are undefined. minimal uses a 10pt font.
Obsolete LaTeX 2.09 commands such as \bf and \it are still supported in article, but not in minimal.
minimal as a real class, e.g. because of the missing font size commands and missing length settings. A minimal example which uses the minimal class might show different results as a real class so it should be avoided. IMHO minimal is just a "hello world" class. article in the no-text case? minimal in a document with text. minimal is that it doesn't assign values to \arraycolsep, \tabcolsep, \arrayrulewidth, \doublerulesep, \fboxsep, \fboxrule so standard environments such as tabular and array won't behave as expected in a class such as article (no separation between columns, no rules, for example). that is all, what minimal defines:
\renewcommand\normalsize{\fontsize{10pt}{12pt}\selectfont} \setlength{\textwidth}{6.5in} \setlength{\textheight}{8in} \pagenumbering{arabic} % but no page numbers are printed because: \pagestyle{empty} % this is actually already in the kernel Using minimal is simpler than using article for creating a graphics with a tight paper size.
\documentclass{minimal}%\documentclass{article} %\pagestyle{empty} %\headheight=0pt %\headsep=0pt \usepackage{pstricks} \paperwidth=72.27pt \paperheight=72.27pt \topmargin=-72.27pt \oddsidemargin=-72.27pt \parindent=0sp \special{papersize=\the\paperwidth,\the\paperheight} \begin{document} \begin{pspicture}(\paperwidth,\paperheight) \psframe[linecolor=red](\paperwidth,\paperheight) \end{pspicture} \end{document} 
standaloneclass since it was specifically created for use in standalone graphics.standaloneclass (written by me) uses thearticleclass internally. As Stefan points outminimaldoesn't define some font related macros like the fonts size commands so it is not really useful for standalone drawings. However, any other class can be used using theclass=<class name>as class option forstandaloneclass.