[texhax] book facing pages are incorrect

Yuri Robbers yuri.robbers at gmail.com
Thu Sep 7 18:12:25 CEST 2006


Hello Nicholas,

On 9/7/06, Nicolas Bingham <Nicolas.R.Bingham at student.uts.edu.au> wrote:
>
> Dear texhax,
>
> I have a very simple document using the book class:
>
> \documentclass{book}
> \begin{document}
> \mainmatter
> \chapter{Chapter}
> Chapter
> \end{document}
>
> However, the facing pages are incorrect! i.e. the odd-numbered pages have
> a large RHS margin and the even-numbered pages have a large LHS margin
> (which is the opposite of the expected behaviour).


This is actually correct. When printed you will have three margins: LHS
margin of the LHS page, RHS margin of the RHS page, and middle margin
between the RHS of the text on the LHS page and the LHS of the text on the
RHS page. All three of these are intended to be equal in size.

It is common to have a so-called "binding correction" for the bit of the
printed paper that disappears into the binding, but the basic book class
doesn't allow for that. There are three solutions for this that come to my
mind rigth now:

- manually change \evensidemargin and \oddsidemargin (which you write you'd
prefer not to do)
- use the geometry package (a fancier way of manual meddling)
- use a different class file, such as Memoir (another well-known class,
KOMA-Script would not be of use to you here since it enforces the very
margins that you onject to)

But you might of course also want to reconsider changing the margins at all.
It is quite well possibly taht knowing what you know now you decide there is
no reason to break with many centuries worth of typographical tradition
based on the experience of thousands of typesetters through the ages... :-)

Good luck,
Yuri.

How can I fix this (aside from manually swapping the odd and even page
> margins)?
>
> Thanks for your time,
>
> Nic
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