What do headheight, headsep, etc. do in the vmargin package?

Question

In the vmargin package, the \setmarginsrb command sets margins, among other things, with this syntax:

\setmarginsrb{left margin}{top margin}{right margin}{bottom margin}%
{headheight}{headsep}{footheight}{footskip}

The first four parameter set the width of the left margin, etc. What do parameters headheight, headsep, footheight, and footskip do? I gather that they have something to do with placement of headers and footers, but I'm having trouble finding documentation that explains this clearly. The vmargin documentation doesn't make it very clear, and I'd like to understand what I'm doing rather than experimenting until it looks right.

Feel free to send me to another question or an external a page that provides a good explanation.

Answer 1

An image is worth a thousand words:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{layout}

\begin{document}

\layout

\end{document}

• \headheight is the height od the area reserved to typeset headers.

• \headsep is the vertical length between the header and the top of the text area.

• \footskip is the vertical length between the bottom of the text area and the bottom of the area reserved for footers.

• \footheight is a command not used anymore in LaTeX2e; it's there just for compatibility reasons. The vmargin documentation says about \footheight:

LaTeX2e (unless in compatibility mode) does not know \footheight any more. vmargin does not set this variable if it does not exist, and sets it if it does. As \footheight was not used by LaTeX 2.09 all this has little significance.

In the standard classes, the top of the text is at a distance of \voffset+1in+\topmargin+\headsep+\headheight from the upper border of the physical page (by dafault, \voffset=0pt).

I've never used the vmargin package. If you want to customize the page layout, popular packages are geometry and typearea. The documentation for geometry contains also useful explanations on the lengths used in the desaign of page layout.