[OS X TeX] Books?

[Maarten Sneep]

On 05-Sep-02 Julien Diard wrote:
>> Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] Books?
>> From: <ccr-mactex at creutzig.de>
>> Date: 04 Sep 2002 17:12:46 +0200
>> 
>> Andreas Gschwendtner <andreas_gschwendtner at yahoo.de> writes:
>> 
>>> If you want to go a little deeper, Kopka's book is excellent. If you
>> 
>> Last time I checked (which admittedly is a while ago), Kopka still
>> recommended clumsy outdated packages like bm2font, manipulating
>> \textwidth et al. directly (horrors!)
> 
> Ooops.
> 
> Sorry for the newbie question, but it appears my current document is
> horrible =)
> 
> What would you recommend instead of using \textwidth? Tu be more precise,
> I'm currently writing my PhD thesis, in french, A4 paper, and the default
> width seems too small to me. So I just wanted to enlarge the thing a bit,
> and I found this \textwidth command in a colleague's thesis. Any advice?

Have a look at the geometry package. For headers and footers, look at fancyhdr

I would reccommend to get a copy of the LaTeX Companion. It will answer most of
your questions regarding layout in LaTeX. At the very least read the manual of
the fancyhdr package, it has a lot of good info.

I would also ask you to reconsider increasing the textwidth. Some research has
shown that the optimum line-length for reading speed is about 60 - 80
characters. In most fonts that is awfully narrow.

Kind regards,

Maarten Sneep

> While I'm at it, another issue I face is the headings content. Using the
> default contents, prints the chapter number and title on even pages, and the
> current section title on odd pages. Some of these titles are too long, and
> go beyong the pages borders, yuck... I know a way to prevent this, using the
> optional arguments to the section and chapter commands, but the problem is,
> I would like to keep the full titles in the table of contents. Any way to
> separate these two things (the title in the page headers and in the table of
> contents)? I guess the messy answer is learn tex and redefine some page
> header computation macro, but, to be honest, I'd prefer something simpler...

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