Default layout is not as expected

Question

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!

Answer 1

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/

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.