I'm writing my PhD thesis and I'm considering to use garamond, particulary ebgaramond. The thing is that the book should be written in A4: with a fontsize of 11pt each of my lines has an average of 90 characters. That is too much.
The quickest answer I came up to was to enlarge up to 12pt. The number of characters is now decent, but it is just too large. The second answer was to enlarge the margins, but then most of the page is empty.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance
In my experience most setters of thesis style requirements have little concept of typography (double spacing EUGH). (In my day theses were written on a typewriter, any maths inserted by hand in ink from a fountain pen, six copies required produced by carbon paper between five sheets of paper in the typewriter, the sixth tending to be a blurry mess --- but that was for the author). But generally speaking you have to produce something that accords with the requirements. In your case at least A4 paper and 11pt font. Your degrees of freedom are presumably some combination of margins and textblock width. If you were writing a book (hardly ever A4 sized) to be published and sold you could discuss the typographical details with the publisher, but that is not an option with a thesis.
If you want to try some page layouts apart from the standard (book, report) layout the memoir class provides a further six built in layouts (> texdoc memoir) 2.10 Predefined layouts.
My A Few Notes on Book Design (> texdoc memdesign) Chapter 3 The page describes and shows some 34 different page designs.
Before going too far in producing your thesis print off a few pages for the powers-that-be to check and approve your layout.
Good luck.
I disagree: about 90 characters per line is not too much for professional (!) readers. Of course the A4 paper format is too broad, but that's how things are. Nowadays I prefer to have a broad margin on the right to scribble comments into it.
However, I wrote my PhD thesis as well on A4 paper, without taking into consideration the format of an eventual publication. The publisher just shrinked the printout to his papersize. Result: very small print.
So my advice is to get an idea where you will publish your thesis in the end and make a layout that will meet more or less the demands of the usual suspects for publishing. If possible, have a 11pt to 12pt fontsize and increase the right margin and the line hight (package setspace, I prefer 1.1 for Libertine e.g.).
