When writing articles for conferences, authors are often supplied with custom layout templates, classes, bibliography styles etc. for LaTeX. The most common file extensions of these files are:

• .cls – Class files to add new document classes
• .bst – BibTeX Style files to format your bibliography
• .sty – Style files containing LaTeX macros

Using those files documents are created according to the style guidelines of the conference proceedings / journals the article will be published in. When using MacTeX on Mac OS X, the proper location for custom extensions is:

~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/

where ~ ist your user home folder. I particularly needed this to install the LaTeX template for Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), which are available here. After copying the whole llncs folder into ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/, I could use the class in my LaTeX environment like this:

\documentclass{llncs}

Happy publishing 🙂