Re: Margins

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message 
<address@hidden>, Francisco 
Vila <address@hidden> writes
> 2009/4/15 Anthony W. Youngman <address@hidden>:
> > Just like a page has a top and bottom margin, and your usable area is
> > usually what's left (but may lose some to a header and/or footer space), so
> > from left to right you normally have left and right margin with usable area
> > being what's left, you sometimes lose some of that to the binding margin.
> >
> > I'll use American sizes for easy maths, but lets say you have a 1/2" binding
> > margin, that leaves you with an 8" wide page. If you now have 1/2" left and
> > right margins that leaves you with 7" of usable space. And you'd spec that
> > as '1/2" left and right, and 1/2" binding margins'. That says everything
> > that needs to be said.
>
> This is only true if you could set a negative binding margin, and even
> in this case you could encounter problems with the paper size.
> Otherwise, how would you specify big outer margins for a book?

Umm. I'd never met that. Bearing in mind other people have said the same 
thing, it seems to be a common enough requirement, though I can't see 
why.

But to specify outer margins, I'd simply declare a binding margin but 
place it on the other side of the page.
> See JPG for an example of outer margins greater than inner margins
> that would need both a negative binding and a virtual page size which
> I don't know how to deal with. Maybe you can offer a solution for
> this, which I still don't see.

Someone else will have to code it, but the obvious solution to me then 
seems to be a "binding" option. The snag at the moment is we don't have 
a right margin, but we could define "left = inner for the right hand 
page", and then if binding is on we swap the margins over for left hand 
pages. One of the options for binding would be to say whether odd or 
even pages are on the right (by default, it's odd, but we can't assume 
that's always true :-)
> In LaTeX you can specify an oneside or twoside option that lets you
> easily handle both cases.
I don't know LaTeX, but is my option pretty much the same?

Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - address@hidden