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!
twocolumn
option to thearticle
class (\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
). (I for one think the former is a very visually attractive document.)revtex4-1
documentclass, which has a style according to APS/AIP journals. Browse through thedoc
folder see some samples (e.g.apssamp.pdf
).