How to force LaTeX to put even pages on the right hand side in documentclass article

Question

In documentclass article I try to put even pages on the right hand side of a twoside document (unfortunatelly it is no option for me to change the document class).

My point is to start with pagenumber 1 on the right hand side with correct margins (from pages on the right side). Any ideas how to achieve that ?

\documentclass[twoside]{article}
\begin{document}
\pagenumbering{Roman}
\thispagestyle{plain}

\cleardoublepage
... content on the left
\newpage
... content on the right
\cleardoublepage
... content on the left
\newpage
\pagenumbering{arabic}
... content should be on the right but is placed on the left side caused by change
    in pagenumbering which leads to pagenumber reset to 1 (which is intended)
\end{document}

Answer 1

With the article class and the twoside class option enabled, the outer page margins will be twice as large as the inner margins (conforming to rather venerable typographic rules ;-)), and there is no binding correction. It seems you assumed LaTeX would horizontally center the textblock and add some binding correction, and so you took even (left-hand) pages for odd (right-hand) pages and vice versa.

As you cannot use another class, try the geometry package and its hcentering and bindingoffset options -- this should result in the desired margins.

\documentclass[twoside]{article}

\usepackage[hcentering,bindingoffset=8mm]{geometry}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1-12]

\end{document}

Answer 2

In twosided (recto-verso) documents, near-universal typographic practice is to have the right-hand or recto pages be odd-numbered and hence the the left-hand or verso pages be even-numbered. This practice is carried out by LaTeX if the twoside option is in force (or if you choose a documentclass, such as book, where twoside is the default).

If you really want to deviate from this practice (at least that's what I understand you want to do), just issue the following commands right after the \pagenumbering{arabic} instruction:

\thispagestyle{empty}
\phantom{a} % enter some "invisible text"
\newpage
\setcounter{page}{1} % reset the page counter variable

It's admittedly kludgy, but it works.

Answer 3

Instead of coercing article.cls into doing something it never really was intended to do, it's probably easier to use another class instead. A relatively simple solution is to use memoir.cls:

\documentclass[article,twoside]{memoir}
\begin{document}
\chapter{The largest document divider}
Memoir uses \verb+\chapter+ for articles as well as books, and
it's smart enough to not display \verb+\chaptername+ when
the \verb+article+ option is given.
\section{The second largest one}
Note that \verb+\section+ gets numbered as X.Y instead.
\end{document}