Message-Id: <199401270922.AA29481@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Thu, 27 Jan 1994 09:18:40 LCL
From: Mike Piff <M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: defaults in latex
Status: R

%>From:          Michael Barr <barr@TRIPLES.MATH.MCGILL.CA>

%>                                     I find A4 oddly long and narrow
%>for my taste.
Not so long ago we used to have foolscap here; if you think A4 is long and
thin, you should see foolscap...

%>pretty irrelevant; it has been a long time since I used an
%>unmodified article style.
%>
%>Michael Barr
%>

True! Almost every one of my documents to be printed on A4 starts with
\documentstyle[...,A4,...]...
where A4.sty is

\oddsidemargin\z@
\evensidemargin\z@
\topmargin\z@
\advance\topmargin-3\baselineskip
\headheight\baselineskip
\headsep2\baselineskip
\textwidth210mm \advance\textwidth -2in
\textheight297mm \advance\textheight-2in
\footskip2\baselineskip
\columnseprule0.1pt

Either that, or bigA4, giving a .25 inch margin, or fullA4, using the whole
paper area.

And if we want portability, we package the styles with the documents.
Mike

PS I guess someone will write back and tell me that (a) I shouldn't assume
that \z@ will stay constant in LaTeX-3, and (b) A4.sty already exists on CTAN.


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%% Dr M J Piff, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of %%
%% Sheffield, UK.                    e-mail: M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk %%
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