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LaTeX Margins

By Jeffrey Howard
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While printing documents I had written with latex, I noticed that the margins were coming out incorrect. I had used the fullpage package, and instead of an even 1" margin on all sides, I was getting only a tiny bit of margin at the top. The bottom margin was nearly twice the distance it should have been. In essence, it looked as though all the text had slid up the page by most of the margin distance.

Platform

I ran into this problem running a fresh install of Redhat 5.2 as well as RedHat 6.0. I had installed all the latex, tex, and dvips related packages. I was using a variety of machines, including a Sparc SLinux machine, an Intel Pentium II based desktop, and two K6 machines. I tried printing to three different printers, all of which were flavors of HP's Laserjet series. In each case, I was printing postscript, not a conversion to the native PCL language.

Failed Solutions

I tried using the geometry package to specify the margins I wanted to no avail. The margins were different, but they still came out incorrect.

Solution

The dvips program was set to A4 sized paper. I was using letter sized paper. The solution was to run texconfig and change the default paper size for dvips to letter. At that point, fullpage's margins began to behave correctly.

Notes

I'm told that information on setting the paper size for dvips is contained in the manual that covers the TeX distribution. I have not checked, but I suspect that the information about choosing a paper size for dvips is not coupled with a description of the symptoms I encountered. In other words, I might well have read the manual and missed it.