Defining the margins

A publisher or a supervisor may request that you follow their specifications for a document. Besides font size, interline spacing, and other style issues, there may be specifications for the margins. In this case, you would need to override LaTeX's recommendations, specifying the margins precisely.

There's a package that fulfills these demands, called geometry. We shall load the geometry package and state the exact width and height of all margins:

1. Extend the preamble of the previous example in this chapter with this command:

   \usepackage[a4paper, inner=1.5cm, outer=3cm, top=2cm, bottom=3cm, bindingoffset=0.5cm]{geometry}

2. Click on Typeset to compile the code and examine the adjusted margins.

The geometry package takes care of our layout regarding the paper size, margins, and other dimensions. We chose the A4 paper size, an outer margin of 3 cm, and an inner margin of just 1.5 cm.

Inner versus outer margins

When a two-sided book...