No specific guideline for the template of first submission I am planning to submit my work to Pattern Recognition journal, and I am looking for its appropriate latex template.
I read the author guidline carefully, but honestly it is quite confusing to me. As to the template, all it says are

elsarticle.cls should be used for latex template
page limits to 20 to 35
double spaced and single column

Then, I am wondering if I can change the the provided template settings when there is no specific instructions for them Specifically,

May I use the template from here, and am I allowed to change its margin? (The guideline gives no specific instruction for the margin specification at all.)


My lab published several papers to this journal recently, however it was all done by docx using Word. What really confuses me is that the latex template provided here has a much bigger margin size than the docx template our lab used.
I would be very grateful if someone who published to this journal using latex could give me some template advices on the first submission.
Thanks a lot for reading my question.
I don't know the rules for this specific journal, but in most venues you're not supposed to tweak the page geometry (margins, headers etc.) of a template, if one is given. To me, it feels dishonest to secretly shrink the margins and squeeze in more content. It may reflect badly on you if the editor notices it.
In any case, I recommend that you contact one of the editors and ask them. That's the only way to get an authoritative answer.