I’m spending some time typing up some recent research. Of course, it’s all very mathematical, so I am using Latex. Latex is a markup language, which means that you write the document in a plain text editor, using codes to indicate font changes or things like that. For example, to typeset some text in italics, instead of pushing a button in some program, you type \emph{word} to mean that word should be emphasized (italicized, it turns out). When you are ready to see your document, you run a program which reads in the text file and outputs a PDF file. It is very useful because it creates well-typeset documents and also has features to make typing math really easy.

The rest of this post is meant for people who already know how to use Latex.

One thing that has often bugged me about my Latex workflow is margins. Not margins in the actual printed document, which you don’t really want to change because that would make your lines too long to easily read. No, I’m talking about while I am working on the document, I have a preview window open so I can see what the thing will look like when it’s done, and 40% of the preview window is wasted to margins.

So here is how you remove margins without changing the line length: by changing the paper size. The easiest way is to use the geometry package, which comes standard with any modern Tex distribution. Just place the following in your preamble:

\usepackage[paperwidth=\textwidth + 50pt,
            paperheight=\textheight + 50pt,
            margin=25pt]{geometry}

Boom. Text the same width and height as before, but with tiny margins and a smaller page.