LaTeX book class: Twosided document with wrong margins

fgysin reinstate Monica picture fgysin reinstate Monica · Apr 2, 2010 · Viewed 45.9k times · Source

I am trying to write my thesis in latex... Cannot get the layout straight though :? I'm using the following document class:

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,twoside,openright]{book}

My problem is: on the odd numbered pages there is a big margin right, and a small margin left - it should be the other way round... (for binding & stuff) I am a little puzzled by this -- am I just to stupid to see the obvious? The odd page numbers appear on the 'right' page of a bound document, so there needs to be a larger gutter margin on the left for binding -- and vice versa. Right?

Why does LaTeX not behave like this?

Here is the full code to produce a small Tex file that shows my problem:

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,twoside,openright]{book}
\begin{document}
\chapter{blah}
Lorem ipsum ius et accumsan tractatos, aliquip deterruisset cu usu. Ea soleat eirmod nostrud eum, est ceteros similique ad, at mea tempor petentium. At decore neglegentur quo, ea ius doming dictas facilis, duo ut porro nostrum suavitate.
\end{document}

Edit: I know about a lot of ways to manually specify the page margins, like

\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{53pt}  

or ...

\usepackage[lmargin=1cm,rmargin=2.5cm,tmargin=2.5cm,bmargin=2.5cm]{geometry}

I just wanted to use the default settings and don't understand why they do not behave as expected.

Answer

Juri Robl picture Juri Robl · Apr 2, 2010

No, that's right. The odd pages should have a bigger margin. If you take a twosided book, you have 3 margings: On the left, in the middle, on the right. Every margin should be the same size. The one in the middle is build by two margins from each side. So it has to be smaller.

If you want to add a bindingoffset, you need to use the package geometry:

\usepackage{geometry}
\geometry{bindingoffset=1cm}

or use another class, like the KOMA-classes:

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper,twoside,openright,BCOR=1cm]{scrbook}