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I just started to learn LaTeX after seeing some amazing examples of scientific articles produced using it; I was also told that, unlike some other other text programs, LaTeX automatically produces articles respecting some publication standards. Well, after playing around with it for a while, I have to say my PDFs are anything but pretty, particularly when compared to those examples I mentioned before! My margins are really too large, my font size seem to be too small, my default paper is not A4 (and even when I set it manually to A4, the top margin then take an even more ridiculous amount of space). After reading a bit, I obviously found out how to control these elements, but the whole point for me to start learning LaTeX was not to fool around with such things. So here is (are) my question(s): am I doing something wrong? Is all this a matter of configuration? Or am I being delusional and my output PDFs actually ARE all in the expected standards? (I am using MiKTeX, and I tried three editors so far: TeXworks, LyX and WinEdt8)

Here are some examples I found on the internet of what I am talking about. The first seems to me as a simple article without any extra layout commands. Notice the size of the margins, fonts, etc. This is how my PDFs look like. http://www.phys.vt.edu/~jhs/phys3154/TeXandLaTeX.pdf

Now compare that previous PDF with this one here: http://academic.reed.edu/physics/courses/Physics332.s08/campus/pdf/FakeArticle.pdf Unfortunately this one is written in two column format but I couldn't find another example online with just one column. Note how everything is balanced, how the margins are small, how the font is smaller as well, etc.

As a final note, I just would like to say that I really don't mind learning LaTex and that I am not expecting to produce amazing documents from day one; I just think that, in case my problems here are really sound, then I might have came to LaTeX with the wrong set of mind.

Thanks a lot!

Martin Schröder
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gilbertohasnofb
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    Welcome to TeX.SX! We really would love to help, but it will be difficult to help you without a minimal working example (MWE). It looks like the latter PDF uses a custom in-house style that, while certainly reproducible (it had to be produced in the first place, right?), is not the default layout. A start though: add the twocolumn option to the article class (\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}). (I for one think the former is a very visually attractive document.) – Sean Allred Sep 04 '13 at 00:14
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    See also http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/71172/why-are-default-latex-margins-so-big. – Sean Allred Sep 04 '13 at 00:16
  • @SeanAllred Thank you very much for your comments, Sean. I do know what is a minimal example, I just didn't thought it was necessary on this case, since I am talking about the most basic default text, something as simple as: \documentclass{article} \begin{document} \title{My First LaTeX Document} \author{Gilberto Agostinho} \maketitle Hello world! \end{document} – gilbertohasnofb Sep 04 '13 at 00:31
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    I had made the first part of the comment before I had looked at your document—I've never heard LaTeX called anything but pretty :-) (But to each his own typographic tastes—just be careful!) – Sean Allred Sep 04 '13 at 00:34
  • Also, I read that article you recommended me before posting here, and I have to say I was kind of disappointed with the answers there. If indeed there is nothing wrong with the default layout of LaTeX and our big papers are to blame, then why absolutely ALL other documents and articles and books I have seen, regardless of the page size, look better than that? I mean, I feel that my documents look clumsy and I feel embarrassed of handling them as they are now. Which comes to my point of not wanting to fool around with margins, etc. – gilbertohasnofb Sep 04 '13 at 00:34
  • @SeanAllred Sean, I just read your new comment here. Indeed that was all I heard about LaTeX, it is always called pretty! And I do see how the proportions between text and title are beautiful, how the tables and math formulas look gorgeous, how it cares that we don't double space or skip lines, it is just amazing. My ONLY problem right now is that I have never seen a paper with such margins before, and I am being told that the fault is to the physical paper itself! It just looks funny to me, that's all.. – gilbertohasnofb Sep 04 '13 at 00:39
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    Judging from the example you showed, you could become happy with the revtex4-1 documentclass, which has a style according to APS/AIP journals. Browse through the doc folder see some samples (e.g. apssamp.pdf). – Christoph Sep 04 '13 at 07:46
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    I agree with the original poster. The default latex text size is small, but also the default space in between lines is very small. Increasing this size results in easier to read text. I agree that the large margins result in easy to read documents and leave some space to make comments, but it also means you need a lot of pages for your document. The default settings could do with some tweaking there. – GrowMyHair Sep 04 '13 at 08:01
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    I would say no, you're not doing anything wrong. I've never understood the commonly heard claim about LaTeX that it "takes care of the formatting" for you, so that you can "focus on the content". You need to take care of the formatting yourself so that it looks the way you want it to, unless you happen to want what LaTeX produces by default (which I never have). – Sverre Sep 04 '13 at 12:21
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    @SeanAllred -- it's quite possible to produce a latex document that is the epitome of bad style and ugliness; i've seen more of them than i would like to remember. but, with some care, it's easier with (la)tex to produce a beautiful, elegant, consistent, and reliably reproducible document than it is with any other essentially free software (and even with many of the expensive options), but it's certainly not automatic. (i'm not a great fan of the default classes either. but there are many other classes to choose from.) – barbara beeton Sep 04 '13 at 18:12
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    @barbarabeeton I agree, and would say that while the default classes are not what we today consider to be 'excellent' typography, it is good enough to be far better than most of the other popular choices with zero effort. While it's certainly possible to create ugly documents with TeX and friends, it is just as un-intuitive to make bad customizations as it is to make good ones---thus, other document classes! :) – Sean Allred Sep 04 '13 at 20:56

3 Answers3

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It seems odd, but you will find very few published journals or books using a single column a4 layout, it's just too wide. Most beginners (including me) start out by reducing the margins, but mostly it's the wrong thing to do.

That said, the default LaTeX class design dates from 1983 or so and was designed to emulate the scribe system from the 1970's so it is hardly surprising that it has a Classic (some might say dated) look when compared with documents designed for an era of electronic distribution and ubiquitous colour support. There are however plenty of different classes and templates that you can use: look around this site or http://www.latextemplates.com/

David Carlisle
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    many journals (most math journals that i'm familiar with) and most books aren't published at a4 (or letter) size -- they are printed and bound on much smaller pages, so the "wider margins" that you see when something is printed on "office size" paper aren't relevant. tex was developed for publishing, not for preparing "office documents". (yes, david, i know you know that, but didn't say it.) – barbara beeton Sep 04 '13 at 13:09
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    @barbarabeeton That's actually what I meant by my first sentence, but you said it better, thanks. – David Carlisle Sep 04 '13 at 13:44
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The real power of LaTeX lies in the usepackages. Somewhere there is probably a usepackage which does precisely what I want. But unless it can do something I can't, I don't care.

This is how I start (almost) every document I write:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{latexsym}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{pdftoolbar=true,pdfpagemode=UseNone,pdfstartview={Fit Width},
 pdfauthor={your name here},colorlinks=true}

\setlength{\topmargin}{0pt}
\setlength{\headheight}{0pt}
\setlength{\headsep}{0pt}
\setlength{\footskip}{0in}
\setlength{\textheight}{9in}

\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0pt}
\setlength{\evensidemargin}{0pt}
\setlength{\marginparwidth}{0pt}
\setlength{\marginparsep}{0pt}
\setlength{\textwidth}{6.5in}
\pagestyle{empty}

\setlength{\parindent}{.5in}
\setlength{\parskip}{.1in}

\begin{document}
\begin{center}
{\Large title}\\
author
\end{center}

LaTeX (as opposed to plain TeX) was designed to make it very easy to write things they way they like to write them and almost impossible to write things the way I like to write them.

John Kormylo
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    You may be able to replace most of your \setlength instructions with the following statement: \usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}. Incidentally, it's considered prudent to load the hyperref package last, unless one also loads the cleveref package, which should definitely be loaded after hyperref. – Mico Sep 04 '13 at 08:14
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    latexsym exists only for backward compatibility; prefer amssymb. – egreg Sep 04 '13 at 08:36
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    I did leave hyperref for last. – John Kormylo Sep 04 '13 at 12:26
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    A bunch of those 'elitist jerks' are regular users of this site and are in fact very nice people :-) a comment on your answer though: most of your length modifications can be made with the package options of geometry. It would also be better style to redefine \maketitle to what you need rather than writing it in your document explicitly. – Sean Allred Sep 04 '13 at 12:30
  • I apologize for the "jerks" part. I don't know them, I just observed the changes from TeX to LaTeX. (God I miss \vbox!) OTOH, let me get this straight. If I find the Title/Author system to be unappealing and high handed, I should rewrite the command to look like I want it, but still use it? – John Kormylo Sep 04 '13 at 13:54
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    @JohnKormylo -- if you examine the possibilities, the "title/author" system is not that different from what's dictated by sgml or its offspring, xml, through a dtd. the structure isn't unreasonable, if you consider that one (perhaps secondary) purpose of latex is to provide a corpus of documents that can be indexed, searched, and retrieved by recognizable elements. having a consistent naming convention makes these functions easier to accomplish. if you don't like the look of the output, go ahead and redefine it, but do keep the input naming conventions consistent. – barbara beeton Sep 04 '13 at 21:12
  • I'm not worried about having my LaTeX source code archived. I'm worried about getting Norton 360 to back them up. (I know how, but I learned the hard way.) – John Kormylo Sep 05 '13 at 13:19
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Two-column layout for A4 makes the most sense to me, but here’s a weird proposal for one-column A4 layout:

Lay out the page as octavo (say, 6 by 9 inches) and when printing to A4, let it scale up to fill the target A4 size. In my test, the scaling ended up being 117%, so with 11bp font it comes out a little under 13bp.

morbusg
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