Two-sided Document Wrong Margins

Question

Background

Wrote a manual in LyX. The PDF is two-sided. Using KOMA Script v2. The pages are 8.5" x 11".

Problem

The spacing on the margins is not printer-friendly, it is reversed:

Since this page is an even-numbered page (4), the print shop said that the extra space must be on the right-hand side. The extra space (for binding) is currently on the left-hand side (of even pages).

Question

How can the margins be swapped so that the larger space is on the right (for even page numbers) while maintaining the same total margin space?

Ideas

• Tried adding a blank page to the beginning of the manual.
• \KOMAoptions{BCOR=3cm}\recalctypearea

The latter results in the margins having been flipped around, but with different spacing.

Thank you!

Answer 1

It is normal that the outside margins are larger than the inside margins. However, KOMA-script/typearea supports the specification of a binding correction. That is, specifying how much space will be lost on the inside of the pages due to binding. The effect is that it shifts the text to the outside by that amount.

You specify the binding correction by passing the BCOR option to the documentclass: \documentclass[BCOR=3cm]{scrbook}. Alternatively, you can also add \KOMAoptions{BCOR=3cm}\recalctypearea to your preamble.

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Edit: One way to switch margins is to add the following to your preamble:

\let\tmp\oddsidemargin
\let\oddsidemargin\evensidemargin
\let\evensidemargin\tmp
\reversemarginpar

This will exchange the margin sizes and print marginpars on the inside. I don't know whether that switching has any other unintended side-effects.

Answer 2

The default layout is exactly right. The idea is that when you open the book flat on the table, the white space at the borders and in the middle (between the even and odd pages of the text) are the same width (for balance). The memoir documentation (memman.pdf) and I believe the KOMA bundle documentation also explain all this in great length.

Answer 3

I had the same problem. Even numbered pages would be inverted margin-wise and page numbers would appear on the ‘inner' side of the page. For me though, the chapter title in the header was on the wrong side as well. E.g. on page 4 it read "Chapter 1.4 xxx" on the left (inner) side and since I put my pagenumbers in the footer those too appeared at the page's inner margin.

So in my case, everything including margins, page header and footer was simply inverted. However, neither my table of contents, nor list of tables and figures were inverted, so I concluded there was something immediately after \listoftables that was causing the inverted margins etc. What I then found was a \clearpage which I put there so that the next chapter doesn't start on the same page as the list of tables.

Look for a \clearpage in your twoside-enabled document and remove it or replace it with a \cleardoublepage if you absolutely need it because \clearpage will cause everything to invert.