Simple Margin Adjustment in LaTeX

LaTeX enforces beauty upon its documents, sometimes to the detriment of practicality. By default, LaTeX margins are extremely generous. This leads to good-looking documents, but there are occasions when it may be better to have smaller margins —— for instance, if you want a document to fit entirely within one page.

Page layout with LaTeX is a complicated matter. A cursory glance at the LaTeX documentation shows that the layout is determined by 11 different parameters. However, I find that the following commands are sufficient for most purposes:

\addtolength{\textwidth}{ain}
\addtolength{\hoffset}{-bin}
\addtolength{\textheight}{cin}
\addtolength{\voffset}{-cin}

where a, b, c are numerical quantities such that a=2b. The effect of these commands is to increase the extent of the horizontal material by a inches and increase the extent of the vertical material by c inches.

If you want more control over your margins, then I highly recommend the LaTeX geometry package. The author of the geometry package is careful to ensure that all page settings are correctly assigned, leaving a straightforward interface to the user. As a simple example, add the following to your preamble:

\usepackage[hmargin=3cm,vmargin=3.5cm]{geometry}

This sets the left and right margins to be 3cm and the top and bottom margins to be 3.5cm. Full details are set out in section 5.3 of the geometry user manual.