It's not doing what I want. What I am trying to do is set the page margins at .5in on all four sides. I want the header to start at .5in and go from there. I want the footer to start so it ends at .5in on the bottom. The problem is that isn't whats happening. I have played with a bunch of variables and can't seem to get it right. The other problem is that the first page seems to be different than the rest even if I manually set the pagestyle. So everytime I try to set the variables like textheight, etc the footer on the first page is in a different spot than the 2nd, 3rd etc pages. Anyone know how to do this?
I tried the tex you gave and it seems to me that the footers on page 1 and pages 2 & 3 are in different places. The footer on page 1 is "higher" (there is more of a gap between the footer on page 1 and the other pages), which is the problem I have been having. How do you fix that?
You are right. I forgot to mention that there is a warning about the head too slim. This causes the differences in the footer on the first page. This can be "corrected" by adding a line to the preamble.
But now all footers are too close to the bottom of the paper. I assume that this is caused by the header which contains two lines in your case. So the compiler has difficulties in calculating the rest. I suggest to modify your sample code as follows.
it seems to combat that and raise the footer up to the correct location (or around it) which seems to make some sense. Assuming a page of 11in, we have .5 on the top for the margin, .5 on the top for the header, .5 on the bottom for the footer, and .5 on the bottom for the margin thus yielding 9.0in for the textheight. Seems to make some sense.
I could also remove the two line header, I didn't realize that was the cause of it. But this is what I think works....