Visual design

10.6 Visual design

In this chapter, we have discussed the logical design of a L A TEX document. The visual design is largely left to the document class. But there is one small aspect of the visual design we have to discuss, the page style.

To get a visual representation of the page style of your document, use layout package of Kent McPherson (see Section 12.3.1). Load the package with

\usepackage{layout} and place the \layout command somewhere in the body of your article. L A TEX pro-

duces a graphical representation of the page layout. Figure 10.4 shows the page layout for odd pages for the amsart document class with no options.

A typeset page has three parts, the running head or header, the body, and the footer. As a rule, the document class takes care of the contents and formatting of all three parts.

For the running head and footer, however, you can override the page design of the document class with the command

\pagestyle{style } where the argument style is one of the following: plain The running head is empty and the footer contains only the page number empty Both the running head and the footer are blank headings The running head contains the information provided by the document class

and the footer is empty myheadings The running head contains the information provided by the commands

\markboth and \markright, the footer is empty The \markright command takes only one argument. The last \markright on a page

provides the running head information for that page. The \markboth command has two arguments. The first provides the running head information for a left-hand page, the second provides the running head information for a right-hand page. The AMS

10.6 Visual design 269

Figure 10.4: Page layout for the amsart document class.

270 Chapter 10 L A TEX documents document classes also have a \markleft command for the running head information

for a right-hand page. The \thispagestyle command is the same as \pagestyle except that it affects only the current page. For instance, if the current page is a full-page graphic, you might want to issue the command

\thispagestyle{empty} The \maketitle command automatically issues a \thispagestyle{plain} command, so if you want to suppress the page number on the first page of a document,

you have to put \thispagestyle{empty} immediately after the \maketitle command.

The commands listed in Figure 10.4 are length commands (see Section 15.5.2) and can be changed with the commands introduced in that section. As a rule, you do not have to worry about these settings, they are chosen by the document class for you. Sometimes, however, you have a job that requires such changes. I once had to submit

a research plan on a form with a 7.5 inch by 5 inch box. To be able to cut and paste the typeset report, I had to produce the text with a \textwidth of 7 inches. If I simply set

\setlength{\textwidth}{7in} the text would overflow the printed page and the last few characters of each line would

be missing. So I had to change the margins by starting the document with \documentclass[12pt]{report}

\setlength{\textwidth}{7in} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0pt}

All of Chapter 4 of The L A TEX Companion, 2nd edition [46] deals with page lay- outs. There you can find a description of the geometry package of Hideo Umeki, which computes all the parameters from the ones you supply. Also you find there a discussion of Piet van Oostrum’s excellent package, fancyhdr, which allows you to create your own page style (see also [24]). See Section E.1 on how to get these pack- ages.

However, if you submit an article to a journal, do not change the type size, page dimensions, headers. Use the document class and the article templates the journal provides (if any). This will make your submission easier for you and the journal.

CHAPTER

The AMS article document class

In this chapter, we discuss amsart, the main AMS document class for journal articles. The AMS book document class is discussed in Chapter 18.

In Section 11.1, I argue that there are good reasons why you should write your articles for publication in amsart. Section 11.2 introduces the rules governing the top

matter in the amsart document class. Section 11.3 contains a detailed sample article. We present the source file and the typeset version juxtaposed. In Section 4.2, you created a simple template for amsart articles. In Section 11.4, you are guided through the process for creating more detailed templates.

A document class is shaped by its options. In Section 11.5, we discuss the options of amsart. Section 11.6 briefly describes the various packages in the AMS distribution and their interdependencies.