Is there a way to tell LaTeX to use smaller margins without setting an absolute margin length?

Question

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?

Answer 1

The rmpage package has text width options of the form wider, widest, narrower, with variations like touchwider, t@ouchnarrower. It also has text height options such as long and shorter.

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}

\usepackage[wider]{rmpage}

\usepackage{lipsum} %for dummy text

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1-5]

\end{document}

which reports

   the width of one column = 980 (characters x 10) 

Package rmpage Warning: \textwidth is too wide for comfy reading.

%
% -----------------------
% LaTeX layout parameters
% -----------------------
%
   \paperheight = 845.04684pt
   \textheight = 634.0pt
   \paperwidth = 597.50787pt
   \textwidth = 430.9705pt

in the .log file. A widish option will not be regard as too wide for comfy reading.

The package is a predecessor to the geometry package, but is often a useful alternative, with the added bonus of a fun and informative manual.

Answer 2

I don't understand your unwillingness to use the geometry package. However, you can use the layout package to see what lengths you can touch in order to customize the margins, and how they look in your document. Then you can adjust the size of \textwidth or \hoffset and check the results:

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage{layout} % show a page layout
\setlength{\hoffset}{0.0in}
\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-.5in}
\setlength{\textwidth}{.85\paperwidth}
\usepackage{blindtext}  % dummy text
\begin{document}
\layout
\blinddocument 
\end{document}

Then, setting a text width to 80 characters should be rather obvious with a monospaced font, but with a proportional font it simply isn't possible. A workaround could be obtain a good Average number of characters in one line and change \textwith accordingly.

But if your problem is simply some homesickness of Word's style, the simplest way is use the wordlike package:

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage{wordlike}
\usepackage{blindtext} 
\begin{document}
\blinddocument
\end{document}

Take a look also to the savetrees package (just change "wordlike" by "savetrees" in the above MWE).