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I'm writing my PhD thesis and I'm considering to use garamond, particulary ebgaramond. The thing is that the book should be written in A4: with a fontsize of 11pt each of my lines has an average of 90 characters. That is too much.

The quickest answer I came up to was to enlarge up to 12pt. The number of characters is now decent, but it is just too large. The second answer was to enlarge the margins, but then most of the page is empty.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Francisco
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    Too large for whom? Probably not for the profs reading your thesis, who probably need bifocals ;-) – Thérèse Oct 08 '18 at 20:06
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    that is why works on A4 usually have large margins. – David Carlisle Oct 08 '18 at 20:32
  • Maybe something like https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/19236/how-to-change-the-interword-spacing? – Marijn Oct 08 '18 at 20:34
  • I think essentially this is a duplicate of https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/71172/why-are-default-latex-margins-so-big – David Carlisle Oct 08 '18 at 21:20
  • Yeah, but, anyway, I am using the option a4paper in the geometry package, so the margins are supposed to be wisely chosen. My conclusion is that I should look for a wider font than garamond :'( – Francisco Oct 08 '18 at 22:49
  • It could be not much noticeable if it is a smaller font at 12pt or a larger font at 11pt, except that the style will change. Or worse, at 11 pt it could look even much bigger than ebgaramond to 12pt (try with bookman, for instance). So, if you like the garamond, stay with it. – Fran Oct 08 '18 at 23:34
  • @Fran Indeed, but since I'm writing mathematics there is a fairly big amount of equations in another font ---lmodern, I guess. I could make the equations smaller; I don't know how yet. – Francisco Oct 08 '18 at 23:52
  • I would assume that you must satisfy tight constraints imposed by your school regarding (a) paper size (A4, presumably), (b) the width of the text block, and (c) the font size (11pt? 12pt?). Everything else, including the number of characters per line, is immaterial as far as the formal thesis requirements are concerned, isn't it? If these assumptions are valid, just concentrate on writing a good thesis for now. Later on, when it comes time to issue each chapter as a separate working paper, you can choose narrower margins and/or a different font. Incidentally, have you considered Palatino? – Mico Oct 09 '18 at 00:08
  • Just for the protocol: There is a Garamond Math font. It is OpenType, so only usable with Xe-/LuaLaTeX, but you would have a more uniform style. I agree with others that the margins are one of the ways to control your lines but please note that geometry does not "wisely choose" margins. That's why packages like typearea have options to recalculate the margins after loading the fonts. – TeXnician Oct 09 '18 at 05:55
  • @DavidCarlisle my aim each morning is to fix all your comments: A4 is actually narrower than US-letter, so I don't understand your remark... –  Oct 09 '18 at 07:57
  • @jfbu sure but single column text at normal reading sizes ends up with big margins in both US Letter and A4. – David Carlisle Oct 09 '18 at 08:38

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In my experience most setters of thesis style requirements have little concept of typography (double spacing EUGH). (In my day theses were written on a typewriter, any maths inserted by hand in ink from a fountain pen, six copies required produced by carbon paper between five sheets of paper in the typewriter, the sixth tending to be a blurry mess --- but that was for the author). But generally speaking you have to produce something that accords with the requirements. In your case at least A4 paper and 11pt font. Your degrees of freedom are presumably some combination of margins and textblock width. If you were writing a book (hardly ever A4 sized) to be published and sold you could discuss the typographical details with the publisher, but that is not an option with a thesis.

If you want to try some page layouts apart from the standard (book, report) layout the memoir class provides a further six built in layouts (> texdoc memoir) 2.10 Predefined layouts.

My A Few Notes on Book Design (> texdoc memdesign) Chapter 3 The page describes and shows some 34 different page designs.

Before going too far in producing your thesis print off a few pages for the powers-that-be to check and approve your layout.

Good luck.

Peter Wilson
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I disagree: about 90 characters per line is not too much for professional (!) readers. Of course the A4 paper format is too broad, but that's how things are. Nowadays I prefer to have a broad margin on the right to scribble comments into it.

However, I wrote my PhD thesis as well on A4 paper, without taking into consideration the format of an eventual publication. The publisher just shrinked the printout to his papersize. Result: very small print.

So my advice is to get an idea where you will publish your thesis in the end and make a layout that will meet more or less the demands of the usual suspects for publishing. If possible, have a 11pt to 12pt fontsize and increase the right margin and the line hight (package setspace, I prefer 1.1 for Libertine e.g.).

Keks Dose
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