33

I want to explicitly specify sizes of my document. For this purposes I use geometry package. I do the following (I found the solution here):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[paperwidth=2394pt, paperheight=6840pt]{geometry}
\begin{document}
    ...     % document's content
\end{document}

But after this I have offsets for my document's content! I think that happens because some margins are set with this directive:

\usepackage[paperwidth=2394pt, paperheight=6840pt]{geometry}

I wonder what are the default page margins for geometry package?

2
  • 3
    geometry has a very good documention. Read section 6.4. Defaults and 5.7. Other options. Feb 17, 2012 at 8:34
  • 1
    Is there a reason for specifying the paperwidth and paperheight in printer's points? It's perfectly alright to use inches and/or centimeters.
    – Mico
    Feb 17, 2012 at 11:11

2 Answers 2

30

The default is that the text width and the text height are 0.7 of the paper width and height. This means that

textwidth = 0.7 paperwidth = 1675.8pt
textheight = 0.7 paperheight = 4788pt

The left and right margins are, for one sided document, equal to each other; this gives

leftmargin = rightmargin = .15 paperwidth = 359.1pt

The vertical spaces are divided in a 2:3 proportion. So

topmargin = (2/5)(.3 paperheight) = 820.8pt
bottommargin = (3/5)(.3 paperheight) = 1231.2pt

See p. 13 of the manual (section 6.4).

The actual results are shown in the log file:

* driver: pdftex
* paper: custom
* layout: <same size as paper>
* layoutoffset:(h,v)=(0.0pt,0.0pt)
* modes: 
* h-part:(L,W,R)=(359.10365pt, 1675.7927pt, 359.10365pt)
* v-part:(T,H,B)=(820.80835pt, 4787.97913pt, 1231.21252pt)
* \paperwidth=2394.0pt
* \paperheight=6840.0pt
* \textwidth=1675.7927pt
* \textheight=4787.97913pt
* \oddsidemargin=286.83366pt
* \evensidemargin=286.83366pt
* \topmargin=711.53836pt
* \headheight=12.0pt
* \headsep=25.0pt
* \topskip=10.0pt
* \footskip=30.0pt
* \marginparwidth=65.0pt
* \marginparsep=11.0pt
* \columnsep=10.0pt
* \skip\footins=9.0pt plus 4.0pt minus 2.0pt
* \hoffset=0.0pt
* \voffset=0.0pt
* \mag=1000
* \@twocolumnfalse
* \@twosidefalse
* \@mparswitchfalse
* \@reversemarginfalse
* (1in=72.27pt=25.4mm, 1cm=28.453pt)

The small differences from the "exact" values are due to the way TeX performs computation (in integer arithmetic).

3
  • Nice answer!! :D Do you know by any chance also the algorithm for the default values for the page layout from LaTeX itself? (I.e. when the geometry package has not been loaded.) Dec 6, 2017 at 9:42
  • @AlexanderFrei I think it's a long section in the LaTeX companion.
    – egreg
    Dec 6, 2017 at 14:37
  • Perhaps I am doing some conversion terribly wrong but some of the measurements here seem inconsistent. How can the side margins be 360pt which according to the conversion you include ( 1cm=28.453pt) is about 12.5 cm. Since A4 paper is about 21cm that would mean the margins are bigger than the whole document. What am I doing wrong here?
    – Kvothe
    Dec 11, 2020 at 11:02
16

geometry's default page margins can be retrieved using \Gm@restore (see Problem with the geometry package reset option), which yields:

\paperwidth=2394.0pt
\paperheight=6840.0pt
\textwidth=1675.7927pt
\textheight=4787.97913pt
\evensidemargin=286.83366pt
\oddsidemargin=286.83366pt
\topmargin=711.53836pt
\headheight=12.0pt
\headsep=25.0pt
\topskip=10.0pt
\footskip=30.0pt
\baselineskip=12.0pt
\marginparwidth=65.0pt
\marginparsep=11.0pt
\columnsep=10.0pt
\hoffset=0.0pt
\voffset=0.0pt

Alternatively, you can also use the layouts package to visually display the page setup:

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{layouts}% http://ctan.org/pkg/layouts
\usepackage[paperwidth=2394pt, paperheight=6840pt]{geometry}% http://ctan.org/pkg/geometry
\begin{document}
\currentpage
\pagedesign
\end{document}

\currentpage sets the dimensions for the current page, while \pagedesign prints the layout and dimensions.

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