Difference between noheadfoot option in the Geometry Package and \pagestyle{empty}

Question

I am quite new to LaTeX and have been playing around with different packages. I would like to do away with headers and footers in my document and I realised that noheadfoot from the Geometry Package will not do the trick, but \pagestyle{empty} will. Why is that? According to page 10 of the documentation for the Geometry Package, which can be found here, nohead and nofoot respectively eliminate spaces for the head and foot of the page and I understand this to mean that my page will not have any headers or footers.

In particular, when I use noheadfoot, I can still see the page number creeping up from the bottom of the page - I do not really see the entire page number, just maybe half of it.

On the other hand, when I use \pagestyle{empty}, I do not see the page number anymore (as desired).

In short, I am not looking for a solution here (since I already have a solution), but rather I am seeking to understand in what way is noheadfoot different from \pagestyle{empty}. Anyone who can correct my (mis)understanding of what noheadfoot does will be greatly appreciated :)

Answer 1

Page style controls what will appear in header and footer, and geometry options control how much space is reserved for each part of a page, including header and footer.

• empty page style sets the contents in header-footer empty, while keeps the space for them unchanged.
• geometry option noheadfoot cancels the space for header and sets the "distance separation between baseline of last line of text and baseline of footer" to zero (from the doc for option footskip, user manual of geometry), while remains their contents unchanged.
  • So if your header is non-empty, its contents will typeset, overlap with the first lines of the main body, and leave bad box message in log.
  • If your footer is non-empty, its contents will typeset, overlap with the bottom of the main body.