5

I have a question regarding the aspect ratio of my pages. I wonder if the given aspect ratio in my example is a good choice or if I should change any values to achieve a better print space. Experts, what do you think? :)

\documentclass[12pt,ngerman]{article} 
\usepackage[a4paper,margin=2cm]{geometry}  \usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}   \usepackage{mathptmx}  
\usepackage[scaled=.90]{helvet}   \usepackage{courier} 
\onehalfspacing \lipsum

\begin{document} \setlength{\headheight}{15pt}
\setlength{\topmargin}{5pt} \setlength{\headsep}{15pt} \textheight =
635pt \setlength{\skip\footins}{10mm} 

\lipsum

\end{document}
lockstep
  • 250,273
Jens
  • 1,431
  • 1
    You should stick to using geometry to set your page layout and avoid manual setting via \setlength. – Werner Jul 08 '14 at 20:52
  • @Werner saying in other words, remove all settings coming up after \begin{document} in the given MWE? – Jens Jul 08 '14 at 20:56
  • 2
    Yes, and add them as a collective \geometry{paper=a4paper, margin=2cm, top=5pt, headsep=15pt, ...}. Note that some of these might be contradicting, as knowing paper (and therefore paperwidth) and margin, you should be able to derive textwidth and therefore do not need to specify it explicitly. – Werner Jul 08 '14 at 20:57
  • 3
    probably not immediately relevant, but if you want a view on traditional page layouts, there's an article in tugboat by hermann zapf, My collaboration with Don Knuth and my font design work, that touches on this. (there are other articles that deal with this topic as well, but that's the one i remember most readily.) – barbara beeton Jul 08 '14 at 20:59
  • 1
    Margins of 2cm on a page of size A4 makes for a rather wide text block. Can you make the margins a bit wider (and thus the text block a bit less wide), or can you go with a two-column layout? – Mico Jul 08 '14 at 21:02
  • I am flexible, I just want it to look more decent :)

    I tried 2.5cm which was a good hint, if I try 3cm, LaTeX complains about problems with managing the floating objects.

     – Jens Jul 08 '14 at 21:06
  • I wonder if I should increase the top and bottom margins or not. What do you think? – Jens Jul 08 '14 at 21:14
  • @jens - could you provide a bit more information regarding the "problems with managing the floating objects"? – Mico Jul 08 '14 at 21:51
  • 1
    @Mico, my settings were wrong. If I change to [!htbp], everything works fine. – Jens Jul 09 '14 at 07:04

1 Answers1

12

The traditional French canon des ateliers would give these values for geometry on a4 paper (not taking into account marginpars, headers nor footers):

"ordinary" printing:

\geometry{textwidth=15.75cm, textheight=23.4cm, marginratio={4:6,5:7}}

"neat" printing:

 \geometry{textwidth=14cm, textheight=21.3cm, marginratio={4:6,5:7}}

"luxury" printing:

\geometry{textwidth=13.1cm, textheight=20.75cm, marginratio={4:6,5:7}}

You can see some explanations and details in my answer to this question.

Community
  • 1
Bernard
  • 271,350
  • @Bernhard: Thanks a lot for your response, very helpful. 1) I wonder what defines "luxury" printing as luxus? The higher amount of pages being printed? 2) If I want to take headers and footers into account, does it affect the given settings? – Jens Jul 09 '14 at 07:03
  • 1
    @Jens: 1) No necessarily. I think that, rather, it refers to very small printing runs — typically less than 1000, for which the amount of sheets of paper per book is unimportant, as you can have with poetry books, with engravings, unusual format, a beautiful vellum paper and the like. 2) I would say no, but large headers like fancyheaders' defaults should be avoided. – Bernard Jul 09 '14 at 08:20
  • In your answer to this question, you say the printing fraction of paper width reserved for the printing zone is most of the time 3/4 for ordinary printing. And indeed, in your code above 15.75cm/21cm=0.75 but 23.4cm/29.7cm=0.788. Is there a reason for this? – Denis Bitouzé Nov 10 '15 at 07:49
  • 1
    @Denis Bitouzé: I've just discovered your comment-question (well, maybe I had seen it before, but didn't have time to answer at the moment, then forgot…). The only reason is that everything is calculated w.r.t. thewidth of the paper sheet: its height is not taken into account. – Bernard Aug 11 '16 at 11:04