Display text area markers

Question

I’d like to display those small makers in the edges of my text areas (i.e. the main area and the head and foot areas). Since I’ve got no idea how they are called or how to describe them, here’s a picture:

Is there a package that does that? Otherwise I got the idea of getting TikZ to do it but I am not very versed in page geometry …

The geometry package has a showframe option that “kind of” does that, but not really. Anyway, you might want to have a look at that. — Juan A. Navarro, Sep 06 '10 at 09:25
@Juan: showframe would indeed be perfect if it didn’t change the layout, too. :-( I’m using KOMA’s textarea package to do the layout and I really don’t want to change that. — Konrad Rudolph, Sep 06 '10 at 10:28
I would be interested to understand the application of this. Technically one can provide this "relatively" easy when hooking into the output routine but to be able to do this efficiently I would like to better understand the spec behind this (given that you aren't talking about crop marks) — Frank Mittelbach, Mar 15 '12 at 16:55
@Frank The reason was simply that the text on my pages didn’t stretch to the edges for some reason and I wanted to find out what caused that. In order to do that, the first step was to reliably visualise how far the distance to the border was. — Konrad Rudolph, Mar 15 '12 at 17:20

score 13 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 15 '12 at 16:47

13

The geometry package's pass option might give you what you want. It disables all of geometry's layout setting shenanigans except for the showframe display. I.e.,

\usepackage[showframe,pass]{geometry}

(The result isn't exactly as depicted in your picture, but judging from your comment to @Juan, it just might fit the bill.)

edited Mar 15 '12 at 16:47

doncherry

54,637

answered Sep 06 '10 at 13:25

Geoffrey Jones

14,435

4

An "lighter" alternative might be \usepackage{showframe} – Brent.Longborough Mar 15 '12 at 17:18

score 5 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 15 '12 at 16:47

5

These marks are usually inserted to indicate the outer page bounds. If that's what you're after, use the crop package. I don't think it can put marks around the text block, however.

edited Mar 15 '12 at 16:47

doncherry

54,637

answered Sep 06 '10 at 09:26

Will Robertson

73,872

1

Aah, “crop marks” was the term I was after – but that’s unfortunately not what I’m after. – Konrad Rudolph Sep 06 '10 at 10:30

Display text area markers

2 Answers2