[Techtalk] Margins in LaTeX

[Yaroslav Fedevych]

On August 26, 2003 06:52, Anirud_Kumar wrote:
> How can I change the left margin and top margin in a LATEX document?

Hope my 2 cents will help also.

You may choose to not use any additional packages. Use
\setlength{\parametername}{value}
in preamble of your document.

To change top margin, say
\setlength{\topmargin}{12mm} % Just an example

Oh, by the way, remember also that there are \hoffset and \voffset which are located, correspondingly, at the left and the top of the page. To them 1 inch is always added. If you want particularly narrow margins, set them to some negative value.

Instead of \leftmargin, you mostly use \oddsidemargin and \evensidemargin. Frankly, it heavily depends on the document class you want to use. In one-sided document, \oddsidemargin is left margin for all pages (as far as my experience shows). For double sided documents (such as reports and books), \oddsidemargin is left margin for even pages, and \oddsidemargin is left margin for odd pages.

Remember, you must use some measurement unit even if you set margins to 0! Valid ones are: pt (1/72 inches), in(inches), cm(centimeters), mm(millimeters), and a couple of others but I doubt you will have to use all of them.

There must be a file layout.dvi or layout.dtx somewhere in /usr/share/texmf/doc/latex tree (at least my one has it). You can find full list of all the parameters you can ever set there.