General ⇒ Getting more in one page... how?? Margins? Font size?

[axelh]

Hi,

I am writing my PhD thesis and need to hand it in tomorrow evening!

In the last minute I found two problems (using TexnicCenter & JabRef & MikTex).

First the easy one: the bibliographical references appear slightly wrong, after the title of the publications there is a dot AND a comma. E.g. G. Washington. The Constitution from tomorrow., J of New Constit, 3 (2009), pp. 23-26. How to fix that?
I am using the biblio style siam. The titles in the JabRef entries have a dot at the end. Everything is perfect except for this comma...

The second problem, real one, which is driving me crazy! I need to include the abstract in English and German. In English it works fine. The German translation takes much more space, and goes over the page, it is extremely ugly... (see images) I tried to make it shorter, but it is not possible to make it short enough to fit in the actual page. There are the keywords which should be below on the same page, they are very problematic...

Is there any trick/clue I can use? I would send a huge electronic hug to whoever could help me!!

I tried changing the topmargin. Then it started before, but it also ended before...I do not really understand how the page layout is working. I copy here the parts which could be relevant, since it is a bit complex (used from a template):

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,twoside,openright]{report}
\usepackage[hmargin=2.5cm,vmargin=3.5cm]{geometry}

\newcommand{\dckeydea}{Keyword1} %Keyword of the thesis
[...]
\newcommand{\dckeywordsde}{\vfill \raggedright {\textbf{Schlagwörter:}}\\ \dckeydea, \dckeydeb, \dckeydec, \dckeyded \\} %this is the line used to print the Keywords below the abstract. Similar in English.
%I tried changing \vfill with \vspace*{0.3cm} and so... not really helpful

%I copy only the part for the German abstract. Similar for English
\begin{abstract}
blabla bla...
\dckeywordsde
\end{abstract}

Any tricks are welcome:
*slightly smaller font size? (how to do it for this page only?)
*slightly smaller horizontal margins? (how to ...?)
*smaller top margin WITHOUT incresing the bottom margin because of that?
*Anything else?

I am open to any suggestion / trick / cheating whatever!

BEST!

[axelh]

One more comment: I saw that I have a dot at the end of _SOME_ tex entries but not at the end of all of them. I could change it manually, but it is over 350 entries... :/

[localghost]

[…] First the easy one: the bibliographical references appear slightly wrong, after the title of the publications there is a dot AND a comma. E.g. G. Washington. The Constitution from tomorrow., J of New Constit, 3 (2009), pp. 23-26. How to fix that?
I am using the biblio style siam. The titles in the JabRef entries have a dot at the end. Everything is perfect except for this comma […]

Should be caused by the BibTeX database file. Check the entries in the database and remove the dots.

[…] The second problem, real one, which is driving me crazy! I need to include the abstract in English and German. In English it works fine. The German translation takes much more space, and goes over the page, it is extremely ugly... (see images) I tried to make it shorter, but it is not possible to make it short enough to fit in the actual page. There are the keywords which should be below on the same page, they are very problematic...
Is there any trick/clue I can use? I would send a huge electronic hug to whoever could help me!! […]

You can selectively enlarge single pages. It is recommendable to do this by multiples of a line.

Code: Select all

\enlargethispage{2\baselineskip}

[…] I saw that I have a dot at the end of _SOME_ tex entries but not at the end of all of them. I could change it manually, but it is over 350 entries […]

Take that time unless you find an algorithm which removes the concerned dots automatically.


Best regards
Thorsten