Page Layout ⇒ Changing the geometry of my document

[pierre]

Hi everyone,
I know I have a rather weird question, but I need the opinion of you Latex experts before daring to actually touch my document's layout.

So here is my problem: I would like to change the width of the margins of my document template (widen them), while altering as little as possible the figure placement I have done so far (lots of figure arrays scattered across about 350 pages...).
Most of my figures (a couple of them being sidewaysfigures) have their dimensions expressed as a function of \textwidth, which is obviously going to change if I tweak my margins. And I would like to prevent my figures from changing dimensions in the process.
According to you guys how should I process?
Define a constant \mytextwidth, and change all my calls to \textwidth in my files?
Does that sound reasonable?

Thanks in advance.

[achim]

I don't think there is a correct answer to your question per se.

Personally, I'd just go about and try it out on a backup copy of the document.
Use

Code: Select all

\usepackage[a4paper,inner=2.0cm,outer=2cm,top=2cm,headheight=14.5pt,bottom=3cm,marginparsep=3mm,marginparwidth=3.4cm]{geometry}

to adapt the geometry to your needs.

I am too very often defining the image width relative to the \linewidth. Just try and see what happens and if the outcome suits you.