Changing a4paper to letterpaper

Question

I am formatting my dissertation using this template: https://www.overleaf.com/2943161npnxys#/8024281/

Unfortunately, the paper size in this is A4 and I need it to be letter sized.

I've tried changing the size in documentclass, and even tried changing the specifications of the a4 paper to letterpaper in the pdftex config files and that didn't do the trick.

I then verified this in MikTeX 2.9 and even tried using TeX Live and that didn't help.

I finally added geometry package and that helped. But that also resulted in the entire text of my document moving offcenter with some of the text actually going off the page.

No amount of changing the margins in geometry helps this.

How do I change the paper size?

Here's an excerpt of the code I am using

\documentclass[12pt,twoside]{Thesis} % The default font size and one-sided printing (no margin offsets)
\graphicspath{{Pictures/}} % Specifies the directory where pictures are stored
\usepackage[letterpaper,total={5.5in,9in}, top=1.0in, inner=1.5in, outer=1.0in,bottom=1.0in,,headheight=0pt,headsep=0pt,centering]{geometry}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\usepackage[square, numbers, comma, sort&compress]{natbib} % Use the natbib reference package - read up on this to edit the reference style; if you want text (e.g. Smith et al., 2012) for the in-text references (instead of numbers), remove 'numbers'
\hypersetup{urlcolor=blue, colorlinks=true} % Colors hyperlinks in blue - change to black if annoying
\title{\ttitle} % Defines the thesis title - don't touch this

\begin{document}

\frontmatter % Use roman page numbering style (i, ii, iii, iv...) for the pre-content pages

\setstretch{1.6} % Line spacing of 1.3

% Define the page headers using the FancyHdr package and set up for one-sided printing
\fancyhead{} % Clears all page headers and footers
\rhead{\thepage} % Sets the right side header to show the page number
\lhead{} % Clears the left side page header
%\pagestyle{fancy} % Finally, use the "fancy" page style to implement the FancyHdr headers

\newcommand{\HRule}{\rule{\linewidth}{0.5mm}} % New command to make the lines in the title page

% PDF meta-data
\hypersetup{pdftitle={\ttitle}}
\hypersetup{pdfsubject=\subjectname}
\hypersetup{pdfauthor=\authornames}
\hypersetup{pdfkeywords=\keywordnames}

\begin{titlepage}
\begin{center}
%\usepackage[top=2in]{geometry}

\setstretch{1.0}

{ \textsc{\ttitle}}\\[4.5cm] % Thesis title
\begin{center}
\normalsize{by}\\
\smallskip
{\authornames}\\[1.0cm] % Author name - remove the \href bracket to remove the link
\setstretch{1.2}
{\supname}\\
{\normalsize{Autho 1\\ Author 2\\ Author 3}}\\[3cm] % Supervisor name - remove the \href bracket to remove the link
%\end{minipage}
\end{center}
%\begin{minipage}{0.4\textwidth}
{\vfill}
\setstretch{1.2}
\normalsize{\textsc{A Dissertation}}\\
\normalsize{Submitted to the graduate faculty of The University,\\ in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of\\ \degreename}\\[0.3cm] % University requirement text
\normalsize{\textsc{City, State}}\\
\normalsize{2015}
\end{center}
%\end{minipage}\\[3cm]
\end{titlepage}

Answer 1

Change line 43 and replace a4paper with letterpaper.¹ ... which won't work. You would also have to delete the vmargin package with its accompanying setmarginsrb, or use \setpapersize{A0} to set the papersize to A0 (simply to see the difference better).

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Please note that, in future versions of the template, it will be possible to use the capabilities of the geometry package by saying \geometry{letterpaper}.

If you have to change the margins anyway, feel free to load package geometry and change the margins according to its manual.

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¹ Please note that changing a class file is usually a bad idea.