What is the easiest way to get borders around a page in LaTeX?

Question

I want my document to have borders in all pages. I imagine I can do that using TikZ, but is there an easier way to do it?

I also asked this question here, but as the main question was something else, this one problem got ignored (probably the use of the word "margin" rather than "border" did not help my case).

Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

Memoir class has option showtrims and commands \trimFrame, \settrimmedsize, \settrims. Example:

\documentclass[10pt,a4paper,showtrims]{memoir}
\trimFrame  
\settrimmedsize{210mm}{145mm}{*} 
\settrims{20mm}{34mm}

Answer 2

You're right that it can be done with TikZ, but it's not necessary to load in the whole of TikZ to get the bits required for this. The part that is needed is pgfpages. You can do a lot of page manipulation with this package, but here's some to get you started:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgf}
\usepackage{pgfpages}

\pgfpagesdeclarelayout{boxed}
{
  \edef\pgfpageoptionborder{0pt}
}
{
  \pgfpagesphysicalpageoptions
  {%
    logical pages=1,%
  }
  \pgfpageslogicalpageoptions{1}
  {
    border code=\pgfsetlinewidth{2pt}\pgfstroke,%
    border shrink=\pgfpageoptionborder,%
    resized width=.95\pgfphysicalwidth,%
    resized height=.95\pgfphysicalheight,%
    center=\pgfpoint{.5\pgfphysicalwidth}{.5\pgfphysicalheight}%
  }%
}

\pgfpagesuselayout{boxed}
\begin{document}

Something simple

\end{document}

Of course, if you're going to use the same layout again and again, put it in a separate style file and \usepackage{mylayouts} in each document.

Note: the package pgf is only needed to provide the command \pgfstroke. As all this does is draw a line, it may be possible to remove this in favour of a \rule of some sort.

Answer 3

A box around your document: it sounds like a frame around your logical page on a bigger paper size. This can be done using the crop package.