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I just stumbled upon a rather immortal topic of making a LaTeX document occupy less pages. I would like to hear out the suggestions from the community in addition to already mentioned. I'll try to summarize and categorize.

There are two (and half) big use cases.

  1. The document style is fixed. This involved all kinds of academic submissions with a given style file, such as conferences or journals. Basically, exact those venues that impose page limits.
  2. The document style is flexible, you just need to cram all this content into the given page limit and can do anything you want.

I will provide the knowledge I have below. Feel free to extend my answer or to add further.

Oleg Lobachev
  • 1,499

1 Answers1

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For the fixed layout:

  1. Rewriting is an underestimated technique, esp. for not-quite polished texts and English language. Begin with paragraphs with few words on the last line.
  2. \usepackage{microtype}, tweak the options
  3. \usepackage{savetrees}, take care not to change too much (extreme is too far).
  4. Use smaller figures? See somewhere \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]? Make it 0.7\linewidth, in most cases nothing of value is lost
  5. \raggedbottom might help
  6. Cull bibliography. Do you really need to cite 1234 papers?
  7. Less spacing in a table, if it helps
  8. Figure positioning saves space. \begin{figure}[!t] and friends. Removing floats altogether is a bold resolve and should be saved for being absolutely desperate
  9. Do not use footnotes, those are mostly bad style anyway
  10. wrapfig should be used in the latest moment, when everything you can do is already done. Also, all the text modifications should be done before using it. Even worse, it requires a lot of time and the presence of not so wide figures. The problem: your layout is basically fixed after using it and you should avoid modifying anything at least in the completely document before and slightly after the occurrence of a wrapfig. I really discourage from using it, but if you must...

For the flexible layout:

  1. Extend \textwidth and \textheight (duh). Overthink you geometry, in general
  2. Lesser margins, less inter-column spacing for double-column document
  3. Cull the space for margin notes
  4. A different font
  5. A smaller font size
  6. \setlength{\itemsep}{0pt} \setlength{\parskip}{0pt} or make even more severe adjustments of the itemize / enumerate spacing. Reconsider those environments as such, writing the text out mostly takes less space. It may cost readability, but at this stage this is a sacrifice I am willing to make
  7. \setlength{\parskip}{6pt plus 2pt minus 1pt} or something along the lines of \parskip-0.01mm
  8. Modify figure and table code or viciously add negative \vspace* to figures and tables
  9. Adjust caption styles, \usepackage{caption}. Smaller fonts for captions?
  10. Modify \section and friends to use less space (savetrees does this more subtly in the extreme mode, but you might want to go full-out)
  11. Modify \section and friends to use a smaller font (again, savetrees does this too, if you ask it)
  12. Typeset bibliography is a smaller font. Don't forget to adjust spacing!
  13. Switch to a different citation style. Author-year is more readable, but abbreviated alpha-numerical styles save a lot of space: instead of "(Papadopulos and Featherstonehaugh, 2020)" you might have "[PF20]". Of course, a pure numeric style, "[8]", takes even less space at the cost of being completely not readable
  14. Use smaller fonts in a table
Oleg Lobachev
  • 1,499