So, I generally like letting LaTeX make most of my typesetting decisions for me--- it generally knows what is typographically "good" better than I do.
One area I just haven't been able to turn control over to LaTeX for is margin size. As has been noted before, the default margins are fairly large in LaTeX. I understand that this is so in order to allow for a reasonable number of characters per line (I've seen 60-80 characters frequently quoted as the target range).
Currently, I am just setting exact margins with geometry (e.g., with \usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
in the preamble, because 60 characters is just too strange looking for me. Lines of around 80 characters I'm fine with, though.
Is there any way to tell LaTeX to set the margins larger without having to fix an absolute length (like 1 inch above)? Say by telling LaTeX to aim more for the 80 character-per-line limit?
koma-script
classes (beginning withscr
? These are designed, as I understand it, to get just this sort of setting right. (Whether it will look too strange I can't say...)typearea
package that comes as part of KOMA-Script but can be used with the standard classes seems to be exactly what you want (this is probably what @cfr meant)rmpage
package has options such aswider
.rmpage
package with thewidish
option seems to give me just what I want. This is could be an answer, and is in fact what I've gone with. Thanks!