I am preparing my doctoral thesis as a two-sided document of class "report." The margins on the odd numbered pages (which open to the right) are wider on the right, and the margins on the even numbered pages are wider on the left. I have seen suggestions that this is correct and intentional, the justification being that there should be room on the outside for marginal notes.
I am not interested in marginal notes. My thesis is to be bound, and as such should have wider margins on the side that gets obscured, partially, by the binding. I have seen suggestions, as well, that the geometry package should be used to force the margins, but it seems to me that LaTeX should take care of making the "right" choices for me by default. If I open a decent textbook, the text is more or less centered on the visible part of the page, with extra space on the physical page to account for the binding.
Any thoughts would be appreciated. I include a minimal working example below. Thanks. - Hy
Code: Select all
\documentclass[twoside,openright,letterpaper,12pt]{report}
\begin{document}
\begin{center}
Title of My Thesis, Which I Pad to Make it Easy to See
That the Wider Margin Lies on the Right,
Even Though This is Page One, and Opens to the Right
(This is also obvious by looking at the page number, below)
\end{center}
\newpage
% A blank page, to be the empty reverse of the title page
\quad
\newpage
\begin{center}
\textbf{Abstract}
\end{center}
Here we have the abstract, an odd-numbered page. Though the page will open to
the right, the wider margin is on the right as well. Thus the text will not be centered nicely on the page ---
the binding will obscure some of the left margin of the page, worsening the effect.
\pagestyle{plain}
\newpage
\begin{center}
\textbf{Acknowledgments}
\end{center}
I would like to thank you for trying to help with this.
\newpage
We begin here the first page of the actual document, an odd-numbered page, on the right, with the same
margin issue as described in the ``abstract.''
\end{document}
