from the desk of stinkpot

produce LaTeX documents with regular letter margins

January 24th, 2006 by Lawrence David

i’ve never really understood those small default latex margins. perhaps they’re for some kind of really small paper. in any case, if you’re printing on regular letter-sized paper (8.5 X 11) and don’t want to kill so many trees, try the following document settings:

\documentclass[12pt,letterpaper]{article}
\setlength\textwidth{6in}
\setlength\textheight{8in}
\setlength\oddsidemargin{0.25in} % LaTeX adds a default 1in to this!
\setlength\evensidemargin{0.25in}
\setlength\topmargin{-0.0in} % LaTeX adds a default 1in to this!
\setlength\headsep{0in}
\setlength\headheight{0in}
\setlength\footskip{1in}

Posted in LaTeX | 5 Comments »

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5 Responses to “produce LaTeX documents with regular letter margins”

1. on 13 Feb 2006 at 4:43 pm   Anonymous

   Um, I’m not sure, but my understanding was that it was for readability–there’s a certain number of characters per line that is easiest to read on a page, something between 60 and 70, and the default margins are set for the writing to be that wide. There’s a package called a4wide that narrows them a bit, as an alternative.

2. on 20 Feb 2006 at 7:08 pm   Tigerhawk Vok

   Also the “Savetrees” package, and “fullpage” package. However, this setup is really grand if you’re making a formula sheet that’s nice and typed up…

3. on 01 Jul 2008 at 11:46 am   Rich

   …another one that’s not central for me…

4. on 07 Sep 2008 at 8:25 am   hsvckeimj amsfn

   mkhp cpilu kforyhj gzkp nsrhejzwa blhpcore xsel

5. on 10 Dec 2013 at 2:53 pm   aj

   Thank you, it worked good using pdflatex in Textmate (Mac OS X 10.6) with MacTeX 2013.